PARIS, May 28: Strapped for cash, and faced with a series of strikes by educators and the country’s principal labour unions, the French government is envisioning the possibility of selling off its control over France’s principal international airports, among them are Orly, Le Bourget and Roissy-Charles de Gaulle.

The government of Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin is indeed ‘studying’ the possibility of privatizing the State-owned agency — Aeroports de Paris (ADP) — which operates the three international airports in the name of the French government.

Although in February this year the French finance ministry affirmed that there was no privatization in the works for Aeroports de Paris, Transport Minister Dominique Bussereau has just let it be known that he’d decided to ‘study’ the issue of the “eventual opening up of the capital” of ADP.

Mr Bussereau’s comment came in the wake of rumours being floated by some of the ADP’s powerful trades unions according to which the French government had decided to prepare itself for the eventual privatization of ADP.

A spokesman for the transport minister did say, however, that “although Mr Bussereau has decided to ‘study’ ADP’s privatization, please be assured that effectively a change of status for ADP is not imminent.”

At its annual press conference earlier this spring, the ADP authorities had noted that the agency had made it through 2002 quite handily — with an operating profit of 203m euros ($230 million) on revenues (+ 4.2pc) of 1.413bn euros ($1.6bn) — and this in spite of an unstable geostrategic context.

Still, admitted Pierre Chassigneux, the chairman of ADP, this year would “certainly be a worrisome year,” with traffic expected to be at least three per cent under what it was in 2002, when already aircraft movements had declined by 2.9 per cent, and passenger activity showed only a slight increase (0.7 per cent) to 71.5 million.

The sharp fall in French domestic traffic is particularly responsible for the worse-than-expected results last year.