Air Alps (Innsbruck) is faced with a potential shareholding reshuffle amid reports that Welcome Air (Innsbruck), the airline's largest shareholder with 76%, is looking to increase its stake in the struggling carrier. The news comes after it was recently announced that the local Green party in AltoAdige/Südtirol was pressuring the local government there to offload its 1.88% minority stake in Air Alps on the basis that it made "no economic, political or legal sense" to continue "wasting public funds" in the airline, which has thus far generated a loss of EUR10million. Air Alps has hobbled from one crisis to another with the coup de grâce coming last year with the loss of its Bolzano/Bozen to Rome Fiumicino flight contract. For its part, Welcome Air likely sees Air Alps as a panacea to its own problems in which ongoing talks with Russian investment group REFCA (Russian European Finance & Consulting Agency) could see a renewed Air Alps/Welcome Air tie-up relocating to Russia, though nothing concrete has been confirmed as yet.