Aer Rianta will find out this week whether its consortium bid for a 50 per cent stake in Dusseldorf Airport is successful. Aer Rianta has a 40 per cent stake in the consortium headed by the German construction group Hoctief. The consortium faces competition from a rival group made up of the American group API and the German industrial group Harpen.

A spokesman for Aer Rianta would say only that the airport authority has been told that a decision on the sale from the regional government of North Rhine Westphalia is "imminent".

The Aer Rianta spokesman also emphatically denied weekend reports that the group was part of a consortium with Schipol Airport which failed in a bid to manage Brussels and Charleroi airports in Belgium.

"We were asked to join but we never were part of any consortium," the spokesman stated.

The outcome of the part-sale of Dusseldorf Airport is of major importance as it would involve Aer Rianta International in its single biggest overseas contract.

Aer Rianta has a 40 per cent stake in the Hoctief consortium, but would not be involved in any major financing of the acquisition, instead providing management services for Dusseldorf in lieu of cash. The Hoctief consortium is thought to be the favourite for the sale.

Dusseldorf is the second-biggest airport in Germany after Frankfurt and has an annual throughput of 15 million passengers a year, substantially more than the 12 million passengers that travel through Aer Rianta's three Irish airports in Dublin, Cork and Shannon.

Dusseldorf has a huge passenger catchment area in the German industrial heartland and provides regular services to most major European cities, including Dublin.

Aer Rianta broke into the airport management contract business earlier this year when a consortium headed by Natwest Ventures, in which Aer Rianta had a stake, bought 40 per cent of Birmingham Airport in the British midlands.

That stake cost the Natwest-Aer Rianta consortium around £45 million, but again Aer Rianta's share of the financing was small, thought to be little more than £3 million.

The scale of the Dusseldorf bid is indicated by the fact that Birmingham has a passenger throughput of just 5.4 million passengers, compared to Dusseldorf's 15 million. Earlier this year, an Aer Rianta consortium failed in a bid for Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth airports in Australia.

Aer Rianta's aggressive overseas expansion into airport management and duty free management is aimed at partly compensating for the likely loss of intra-EU duty free sales from mid-1999.

Aer Rianta International will have managed sales of over £400 million when its huge Hong Kong duty free contract is fully operational and those managed sales would rise even further if the Dusseldorf Airport bid is successful.