Airbus Reportedly Irked at U.S. Trade Negotiators

Airbus Industrie has said it will fight back if the U.S. tries to exert new pressure on the European aircraft consortium in the protracted dispute over subsidies to commercial aircraft builders.

Airbus Chief Executive Jean Pierson was quoted in Tuesday’s editions of the daily newspaper Le Monde as saying that the bilateral talks aren’t moving forward and indeed took a step backward in February when the U.S. negotiators went back on an earlier agreement and made new demands.

A U.S. Department of Commerce study has estimated that Airbus Industrie’s European partners in Britain, France, Germany and Spain received government subsidies totaling $13 billion between 1976 and 1990. The European Community Commission has retorted that U.S. companies received between $33.5 billion and $41.5 billion in government support over the same period.

Pierson said the U.S. has made “outrageous” new demands for financial transparency. “We’re giving them all the documents we give our parliamentarians and they say it isn’t enough and that there should be an independent international audit.”