Businessmen mull potential £1bn bid for Scottish airport

EDINBURGH or Glasgow Airport may be taken over by a group of prominent Scottish businessmen, who are mulling a bid of up to £1 billion for one of the assets.

As reported by Scotland on Sunday, investment banker Ben Thomson and Richard Jeffrey – the former Edinburgh Airport boss who recently jumped ship from trams firm Tie – are understood to have held early-stage talks with potential investors and other business leaders over the possibility of mounting an offer.

David Watt, head of the Institute of Directors in Scotland, last night welcomed the prospect of one of the assets being taken into Scottish hands.

He cited various examples, including Birmingham, of airports that are locally-owned and successfully run.

“The principle of Scotland owning one of its own airports is probably quite a nice idea,” he said. “It is done in quite a few places across Europe.”

Airports operator BAA, which is owned by Spanish firm Ferrovial, is expected this week to unveil the formal process for selling either of the sites and may reveal its hand over which it would rather offload.

However, sources say that the group may also choose to put both airports on the market to gauge appetite before deciding which one to part with. Glasgow has been valued at about £500 million while it is believed Edinburgh could attract between £700m and £1bn.

A sale has been ordered by the Competition Commission, which earlier this month told BAA to accelerate the disposal of one of its Scottish airports before an auction of Stansted near London.

BAA has succeeded in delaying the sale of Stansted, in Essex, with a judicial review – a move the commission described as “frustrating”.

Laura Carstensen, chairman of BAA’s “remedies implementation group”, said the sale of one of the Scottish assets would provide passengers and airlines with “benefits of greater competition even sooner than they would have done otherwise”.

Aviation experts say Glasgow is the favourite for a sale as it offers less scope for growth.