Aviation
Czechia · Türkiye
Merger — cleared with commitments
11 Sep 2026
Turkish Pegasus cleared with commitments to take over České aerolinie and Smartwings
On 11 September 2026 the Czech competition authority ÚOHS announced that it has allowed Turkey's Pegasus group to acquire České aerolinie a.s. and with it the carrier Smartwings. Clearance is conditional on commitments the Turkish company proposed itself, centred on handing part of its summer-season slots on the scheduled Prague–Antalya route to another airline. ÚOHS states that the decision was issued at the end of August but is not yet final, because the period for filing an appeal has not expired. The authority had been examining the case since May. It found the competition problem in the overlap on scheduled direct passenger flights between Prague and Antalya in the summer season, where the merged entity would have reached a very high market share with a wide gap to its competitors, and where — contrary to earlier expectations — no further carriers had entered the route. ÚOHS says the purpose of the structural commitment is to let potential competitors gain access to airport slots quickly.
Our take
Note the wording, because it matters for anyone reading deal news as a guide to their own timetable. This is not a completed acquisition. The decision was made in August, published in September, carries conditions, and is still open to appeal — three separate gates between a signed transaction and a change of ownership. Aviation is an extreme case, but the pattern is ordinary: in any deal where the buyer and the seller overlap in the same local market, the regulator's calendar becomes part of the transaction, and the remedy is negotiated rather than imposed. Pegasus proposed the slot transfer itself, which is the usual way a buyer shortens the review — you offer the narrowest fix that solves the authority's stated problem. A buyer of a business with a strong regional position should assume the same logic applies, at a smaller scale, whenever the buyer is itself the competitor next door.