Ryanair to drop London Stock Exchange listing to comply with EU

Ryanair has confirmed it will quit the London Stock Exchange next month to comply with EU ownership rules that have hit the airline industry following Brexit.

The move will end the Irish carrier’s 20-year listing on the LSE, making it one of the clearest examples of how the UK’s exit from the EU has affected London’s capital markets.

Ryanair warned earlier this month that it was considering leaving the LSE because of EU rules requiring airlines to be owned and controlled by nationals from within the bloc, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland or Liechtenstein.

The airline has barred non-EU individuals from buying shares in the company for nearly 20 years, and in January extended this to institutions and individuals in the UK after the country left the bloc.

On Friday, Ryanair said it expected the last day of trading in its London-listed shares to be December 17. Although the airline’s primary listing is on the Euronext in Dublin, London has long been a more liquid market than Dublin for its stock.

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However, the volume of its shares traded on the LSE has tumbled since January and now comprises just 10 per cent of the total, according to calculations by Mark Simpson, an aviation analyst at Goodbody.

“The volume of trading of the shares on the London Stock Exchange does not justify the costs,” the airline said on Friday.

UK shareholders who held Ryanair shares before January have been able to keep their holdings but are barred from attending or voting at annual meetings. But the carrier has struggled to keep new UK investors out.

It had to eject some UK shareholders in September through the forced sale of 1m shares after they bought into the company.

“UK [shareholders] can continue to hold if they want, but will have to now sell through Euronext should they want to do so,” Simpson said of UK investors who owned the shares before Britain left the EU in January.

Ryanair is one of several airlines that has been forced to make changes to its corporate structure to comply with airline ownership rules in order to protect their ability to fly freely within the EU after Brexit.

Wizz Air has also taken away the voting rights of UK shareholders, while easyJet has set up a Vienna-based airline to carry out its European operations.

British Airways owner International Airlines Group, an Anglo-Spanish company, has not recently disclosed a breakdown of its ownership, but the Spanish and Irish regulators have declared that it complies with EU rules.

Michael O’Leary, Ryanair’s chief executive, told the Financial Times earlier this month that he expected Brussels to carefully examine whether companies are complying with ownership rules in the coming months. “The EU authorities, I think particularly…