Emirates boss Tim Clark will travel to the US this month to defend his airline against allegations that Gulf operators receive huge government subsidies.

According to The National newspaper, Emirates is putting together a top team from its legal, strategic and financial departments to respond to allegations made by US airlines that it had used unfair business methods to become one of the leading forces in global aviation. Read more.

American carriers Delta Airlines, United Airlines and American Airlines, are spearheading a lobbying effort to address ‘subsidized competition’ from state-owned airlines in Qatar and the UAE. They say they have documents that prove that multi-billion dollar subsidies are provided by the governments of Qatar and the United Arab Emirates to Qatar Airways, Etihad Airways and Emirates in violation of Open Skies policy.

They say ‘evidence’ gathered during a global, two-year investigation ‘shows’ that those three state-owned carriers have received $42 billion in quantifiable subsidies and other unfair benefits from their respective governments in the last decade alone, including:

Qatar Airways

• $8.4 billion in government loans and shareholder advances with no repayment obligation
• $6.8 billion in subsidies from government loan guarantees
• $616 million in airport fee exemptions and rebates
• $452 million in free land

Etihad Airways

• $6.6 billion in government loans with no repayment obligation
• $6.3 billion in government capital injections
• $3.5 billion in additional undisclosed government funding in 2014
• $751 million in government grants
• $501 million in airport fee exemptions

Emirates

• Unquantified subsidies from purchases of more than $11 billion in goods and services from other government-owned companies at not-at-arm’s-length prices
• $2.4 billion from government assumption of fuel hedging losses
• $2.3 billion from subsidized airport infrastructure

The US airlines say these ‘massive subsidies’ have enabled Qatar, Etihad and Emirates to rapidly expand their fleets and international routes, ‘distorting’ the commercial aviation marketplace and ‘diverting’ global traffic to their hubs.

The US airlines further claim that Qatar, Etihad and Emirates are not meaningfully stimulating new passenger demand on their routes, and that the only way these airlines can grow at such a rapid pace is by using the huge, artificial advantage created by government subsidies to capture U.S. airline market share, shifting American aviation jobs overseas and negatively impacting the U.S. economy.