By Rajesh Kumar Singh and David Shepardson
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -American Airlines Group will appeal a U.S. court decision requiring it to end an alliance with JetBlue Airways Corp, American CEO Robert Isom said on Wednesday.
U.S. District Judge Leo Sorokin in Boston ruled on May 19 that the airlines’ “Northeast Alliance” broke antitrust law and ordered the companies to dissolve the arrangement within 30 days.
“We’ve got a legal system that allows for appeal, and we’re going to do that,” Isom told the Bernstein Conference.
The U.S. Justice Department sued in 2021 to undo the alliance announced the previous year. It called it a “de facto merger” of American and JetBlue operations in Boston and New York that removed incentives to compete and would end up costing consumers an additional $700 million a year to fly out of the region’s busy airports.
“These two powerful carriers act as one entity in the northeast, allocating markets between them and replacing full-throated competition with broad cooperation,” Sorokin wrote in his ruling, a rare court victory for President Joe Biden’s administration and its hard line against corporate consolidation.
(Reporting by Rajesh Kumar Singh in Chicago and David Shepardson in Washington; Editing by Chris Reese and Deepa Babington)
