EU-funded airport infrastructures : Poor value for money Special report No 21/2014

The Court audited 20 airports in five Member States and found that EU funding is in many cases provided to airports in close proximity to each other: for 13 airports, significant overlaps exist with the catchment areas of neighbouring airports. This produced poor value for money and resulted in oversizing of the EU-funded infrastructures and in over-capacity. The Court also observes that the EU funding was not cost-effective and that seven of the airports examined are not profitable: these may need to be closed unless they receive continuous public financial support. The EU funding of airports is not well coordinated at national level and, in particular as regards major projects and cohesion fund projects, insufficiently supervised by the Commission which generally does not know which airports receive funding, and how much they receive