WTO upholds ruling on Boeing subsidies

GENEVA (Reuters) - The World Trade Organization said on Monday it had upheld the bulk of a ruling that Boeing received billions of dollars of subsidies to compete with Europe's Airbus , as both sides once again claimed victory in a long-running trade row.

The subsidies included at least $2.6 billion in assistance from space agency NASA, which the WTO's appellate body agreed had allowed the U.S. company to launch its modern 787 Dreamliner and cause "serious prejudice" to its European rival.

The ruling is the latest step in a seven-year dispute involving mutual claims of aid for the world's dominant planemakers and could theoretically lead to retaliation on both sides once the Geneva trade body's procedures are exhausted.

The WTO has already ruled that Airbus received illegal aid through a system of European government loans but the two sides cannot agree on the scope or impact of that ruling.

Most observers expect the United States and the European Union will eventually negotiate a settlement to end the row, since it could rumble on for years more amid pressure for compliance from both sides.

The EU has passed a deadline for compliance in the case against Airbus last December and the United States has begun a "compliance procedure", threatening to hit the European Union with sanctions worth $7-10 billion annually.

The biggest trade dogfight at the WTO has already lasted longer than the Uruguay Round negotiations that led to the birth in 1995 of the world trade body.

As so often in a saga with implications for jobs on both sides of the Atlantic, both sides gave their own interpretations as soon as the 598-page report came out.

The United States acknowledged that Boeing had been found to receive between $3 billion and $4 billion in subsidies in the form of federal research grants and local tax breaks, which is more than the $2.7 billion it conceded originally.

But U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk called the decision "a tremendous victory" for the United States because according to Washington's calculations the WTO had previously found that European governments gave $18 billion in aid to Airbus .

"It is now clear that European subsidies to Airbus are far larger - by multiples - and far more distortive than anything that the United States does for Boeing," Kirk said.

Washington has called on Airbus to stop using the loans, especially for its next aircraft, the A350.

The European Union sought to keep the focus on the most recent finding.

"Today's ruling vindicates the EU's long-held claims that Boeing has received massive U.S. government hand-outs in the past and continues to do so today," EU Trade Commissioner Karel De Gucht said in a statement.

"The costs to EU industry from these long-term subsidies run into billions of euros. The U.S. should now put an end to such harmful subsidies," he said.

The WTO had originally found that Boeing received at least $5.3 billion in subsidies including $2.2 billion in tax breaks through a defunct system of offshore corporations.

In Monday's appeal verdict, WTO judges accepted that the $2.2 billion of Foreign Sales Corp tax breaks were no longer relevant but strengthened a finding that Boeing got almost $500 million in subsidies through bonds issued in Wichita, Kansas.

Boeing officials said that what the company had lost, by seeing the amount of illegal subsidies revised upwards, had been offset by reductions in the amount of harm caused to Airbus, which they said had been reduced sharply in the appeal.

The amount of harm will be important later when regulators try to assess how much, if any, retaliation is justified.

EADS subsidiary Airbus insisted the amount of damage identified by the WTO remained as high as ever and said it had lost $45 billion in sales due to Boeing subsidies.

(Additional by Sebastian Moffett, Doug Palmer; Editing by Janet Lawrence)