Originally Posted by
Gillegan
Okay, so I'm not that great at dissecting theses things and I didn't read the entire 1000 page report but could anyone direct me to where in the report was the so-called "smoking gun" regarding Emirates? What I could find was a few vanilla balance sheet statements for 1996-1999 (?) that had nothing that I could find and then a 1 paragraph statement that said "it's out there" (I'm paraphrasing). In reading the White Paper, I assumed that there would certainly be SOME justification for the charges leveled.
If that's all they've got, disingenuous doesn't even begin to cover it. It would appear that the strategy here is to use the subsidies of Etihad and Qatar (I'm still assuming that there is at least some substance in those claims but given what's not in there on Emirates, that may not be a fair assumption!) to hammer Emirates which IS the biggest commercial threat to the US3 (which may work because it is a country to country dispute).
Gloopy, perhaps you could cite the evidence (other than just saying it's there because I said so). Seriously, that's it?
There's not going to be much in the 1000 pages because Emirates is the "more transparent" (for lack of a better term) of the Big ME3. Apparently for the other two airlines, they had to piece together information from multiple, varied sources and that's what the 1000 pages represents. The case against Emirates is largely publicly available (severely discounted landing fees at shiny new airports, fuel hedge subsidies, Dubai Inc business dealings, etc.) so therefore not in the 1000 pages. For example, when the government took over a few billion bucks in fuel hedging contracts for Emirates, the transfer of the contracts was noted in Emirates' financial disclosures and footnoted in the original whitepaper, and therefore would likely not be within the 1000 pages. Not sure how that is disingenuous?