The whole historical issue about who had what subsidies when, I think is a distraction - a cynic might say it was an attempt to drag this out until after the US Presidential elections - as it is clear from various reports from all sorts of reputable sources and admissions that governments have started airlines and fostered environments for aviation industries since forever and it has been tolerated as most of those airlines have encountered competitive problems in their history. That shouldn't have a bearing on the current situation - the idea that government involvement in capitalism is tolerable only if private/public companies can do things better veers a bit too close to economic ideology to the exclusion of things such as the public interest in having effective competition and better consumer choice/value.

I think the "they (the US3) had subsidies in the past so even if we (Gulf Airlines) have subsidies now, it's ok" is quite a weak argument - it makes an admission that the cash injections etc. are actually subsidies for a start, which undermines their (ME3) arguments slightly. Hence the relative silence from EY and QR.

EK's case to the public and interested regulators should be entirely predicated on their representations that they receive no on-going cash/equity injections from their owners to cover any operating losses at all and demonstrate that using a variety of information that they have, both public and independent data, and if necessary confidential data that can be presented regulators (e.g. the details of derivative contracts in the case of the fuel hedge, or yield data).