The investigation initiated about the claim that General Directorate of State Airports Authority (DHMI) abused its dominant position by discriminating among tenants with respect to slot allocation in airports was concluded.

The investigation started after Ankara 9th Administrative Court annulled the Board decision dated 24.04.2012 and numbered 12-21/561-159 concerning the same issue. According to the said Board decision "DHMI did not abuse its dominant position in the relevant market by means of making a distinction between undertakings that rented land and/or facilities on land by taking into account "those allocated slots before 31.12.2005 or after" and price tariffs it determined based on this criteria in ‘Slot allocation Tariffs’; fulfilled the requirements of the decision by the Competition Board dated 04.07.2007 and numbered 07-56/668-231; thus, its practices mentioned in the complaint did not violate article 6 of the Act no 4054 of the Protection of Competition.”

The complainant appealed the decision and Ankara 9th Administrative Court annulled the Board decision in question with its decision dated 31.10.2014 and numbered 2013/526 E., 2014/1045 K. In brief, Ankara 9th Administrative Court decided that "taking into account the fact that agreements were made on different dates does not mean that undertakings are not equal buyers; agreements made by undertakings on different dates continued with renewals every year, the periods of the agreements overlapped with the periods of new agreements, in order to analyze the price difference between agreements, if there is any as claimed by the complainant, there should be a comparison between the rents demanded from THY and connected undertakings before 31.12.2005 and after (according to the new tariff) and the contract law is applicable for removing the disproportionality between prices; thus, the transaction, which was made without observing the said issues, did not comply with the law.

The investigation initiated upon the abovementioned Court decision examined, by considering the issues pointed there, whether DHMI violated article 6 of the Act no 4054 by imposing different conditions for the same and equal rights, obligations and acts with respect to slot allocation services in airports to equal buyers.

As a result of the discussion of the contents of the file on 09.09.2015, the Competition Board decided that DHMI did not violate articles 6 of the Act no 4054; thus it was not necessary to impose administrative fines on the said undertaking according to article 16 of the same Act.

Click here for the text of the pronouncement (in Turkish) dated 09.09.2015 and numbered 15-36/559-182, the reasoned decision for which will be notified later and which can be appealed before Ankara Administrative Courts.