If we discount the 30 billion USD of cash/loan guarantees that EY and QR received for the moment - if I understand your point correctly, you are going further in saying that EK took billions of cash during its history to get to a stage where it could possibly be plausibly profitable/breaking even from ops.

That's the point I have trouble with, considering Dubai's relative poverty and lack of resources to do such a thing, and that total expenditure didn't even reach the 3 billion USD mark until 2002 (I appreciate you think their published information is a lie, though), and that Dubai borrowed a lot of money to do other projects. If you haven't got any transparency anyway, why wouldn't you just borrow money straight onto EKs books instead of going through this charade of publishing accounts back in the 2000s and before?

If the point is a more general one, that Dubai borrowed lots of money to build airports and hotels and tourist attractions, which had the effect of making people use EK to get to Dubai - I think you are widening the definition of subsidy to be totally meaningless, because that is a perfectly legitimate way for governments to spend their money. Infrastructure investments don't have to pay for themselves - they form part of the critical infrastructure of a country in order for it to function properly. The economic impact is unquantifiable. If that way of thinking was dominant last century, we would never have the Eisenhower Interstate System (which still doesn't pay for itself), the Marshall Plan, European motorways, energy transmission systems etc. Now that the idea that everything, in part and in full, has to pay for itself - and debt is not acceptable - has become quite popular recently, we have these problems where infrastructure starts to decay and becomes a hinderance to GDP growth as direct usage charges are politically unacceptable/don't cover costs. Germany is in fact a bit of a culprit here, along with the US. http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2014/wp14227.pdf, http://www.wsj.com/articles/imf-call...ure-1431344662, https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft.../02/pdf/c3.pdf. So governments take on debt for a variety of reasons - and there are many governments out there with wholly state-owned companies, with high sovereign debt loads and continually run deficits.

Yet we don't accuse state owned infrastructure management companies as scams, even when they make profits with large debt loads. Take for instance, Network Rail in the UK, which made 1bn GBP profit in 2014, is a public sector organisation whose debts are now part of the sovereign's debt, borrows money from the government instead of capital markets, yet could only be considered a scam of an organisation by the most extreme libertarian economic views.

Still, that is a bit of an economic digression. The point is that infrastructure spending is perfectly legitimate, debt financing is perfectly legitimate, and it is clearly absurd to expect that any spending from which EK benefits from in an ancillary manner (as in, not targeted at them - state aid rules in the EU agree here, aid has to be on a selective basis: http://ec.europa.eu/competition/stat.../index_en.html), that EK now has to find the cash to "pay it back" in order to be seen as "clean". That is such an outrageous standard to hold any company to that I think qualifies as "panic and screaming". After all over 100 airlines and air cargo companies operate using infrastructure that both directly (such as an airport) and indirectly (low taxes for its workers and highways for them to get around) benefits them - why are they not being told to repay the cost of the historical Dubai government investments? The only thing selective here is the singling out of EK for flimsy reasons at best and quite prejudiced ones at worst.

As to the panic and screaming - I think Tim Clark has been quite measured in his responses, considering that he is accused of consistently lying through his teeth for years. It's one thing to attack the company he runs, but to be de facto personally accused of orchestrating a massive fraud I think speaks volumes about "panic and screaming" on the part of the accusers (who have yet to come up with any definitive proof apart from disbelief) rather than on Tim Clark.

Akbar Al-Baker is of course, Akbar Al-Baker - one can draw one's own conclusions about this airline. James Hogan is being rather quiet.

P.S. what is this insider knowledge though - is it a leak from the internal EK audit/finance departments showing a smoking gun of falsifying statements, or is it incomplete information from a snapshot of the network, or one small part, disclosed by people with an agenda, which is then being extrapolated to paint an inaccurate picture of the whole? Not all experts and not all insider information is of the same value - I would welcome any of that here with the associated methodology in order to push the discussion onwards from the whole "innocent until proven guilty/guilt until proven innocent" merry-go-round that we are stuck in...