Last March, a photograph of Michael O'Leary dominated the front page of Sweden's influential Dagens Nyheter newspaper's business section. Pulling a funny face, O'Leary sat with his arms outstretched pretending to look like an airplane. The headline read "Low-Price Pilot," and a full-page article on the man behind the Ryanair success followed.
While O'Leary's airplane poses don't always appear in the Swedish media, articles on the Irish carrier regularly do and they're not always as good-humoured as the light-hearted photos suggest.
Last year, the airline was forced to stop an advertising campaign that, according to the Swedish courts, was not showing the full price of airfares.
Earlier this summer, Ryanair found itself back in court for similar reasons. This time it was fined 400,000 Swedish krone (€45,000) for "misleading price-comparisons" with Scandinavian Airlines' ticket prices.
In the last fortnight an advertising agreement between Ryanair and Nyköping County Council in Sweden was deemed illegal. Ryanair's Scandinavian hub, Skavsta airport, is just over 60 miles southwest of Stockholm and part of Nyköping county. The county council agreed to pay Ryanair 55 million Swedish krone (€6.15 million) in return for advertising space on Ryanair's planes and website over the next 10 years. Competitor airlines regard the sum as unusually large and believe the amount is merely a subsidy by the council to the airline.
Nyköping county manager Mr Göran Forssberg disagrees claiming it's already reaping the benefits of the recently introduced advertising. "Sweden had a decrease in tourist numbers this summer but Nyköping had an increase. I know of at least two hotels planning expansions and investors are phoning us all the time," he says. Mr Forssberg claims the increase in jobs to the region means extra taxes to Nyköping county, which more than pays for the advertising fee agreed with Ryanair.
The Irish airline is also facing another battle from SAS, the Scandinavian airline. SAS claims the civil aviation authorities in Sweden, Finland, and Norway are breaching international obligations by favouring Ryanair over other airlines.
Mr Anders Svidén, director of government charges at SAS, says rebate schemes have been introduced in Malmö's Sturup airport in Sweden as well as in Tampere in Finland and Haugesund in Norway. "In Tampere for example, they are offering free passenger charges in their low-cost terminal and this airport is being subsidized by Helsinki airport where we, with Finnair, are the main operators. For us, this is a clear breach of international principles of non-discriminatory treatment of airlines. We feel cheated by these authorities."
But the flip side of Ryanair's misdemeanours and controversial activities is the business it has brought to Scandinavia. Ryanair now lands in two Danish, two Norwegian, one Finnish and four Swedish destinations.
In April, the airline officially chose Stockholm's Skavsta airport as it's ninth European hub and now it flies to nine different European destinations from there. Some 326,000 passengers passed through Skavsta last year. The estimated figure this year is 1.2 million.
With twice the population of Nyköping flying into its local airport every month, the town certainly feels like it's taking off and the county council attributes all of this success to the arrival of the Irish airline.
