BAA May Need to Sell 3 U.K. Airports Including Gatwick, FT Says

By Paul Dobson

Dec. 13 (Bloomberg) -- BAA Ltd. needs to sell two more airports after disposing of Gatwick, south of London, to satisfy competition authority requirements, the Financial Times said, citing people familiar with the situation it didn’t identify.

Grupo Ferrovial SA’s BAA failed to persuade the U.K. Competition Commission that selling Gatwick airport would curb its dominance of the sector and will need to sell a second of its three London airports and one of Glasgow and Edinburgh airports, the Financial Times reported. BAA and the commission declined to comment, the newspaper said.

Damon Hunt, a BAA spokesman, said his company won’t receive a report from the competition authority about possible divestments until Dec. 17 and hasn’t seen a copy. The information in the Financial Times article didn’t come from BAA, he added, speaking in a telephone interview from London today.

To contact the reporter on this story: Paul Dobson in London at pdobson2@bloomberg.net