“It's just Italian politics,” he said to reporters at a press conference in Lisbon, the capital of Portugal. “You have a bunch of populists running around in Italy, it's what populist politicians do.”

Having grown to be the biggest airline in Italy, Ryanair now confronts several regulatory obstacles. It is at odds with the Italian government, which is attempting to keep domestic flight costs to its principal islands low during rush hours.

The inquiry was prompted by Giorgia Meloni's government's September retraction of previously declared steps to address high rates, which eliminated a set ceiling on rises for flights to the islands.

According to the statement, the antitrust agency's probe will concentrate on the potential drawbacks of pricing algorithms and look at how ticket prices and their constituent parts are disclosed to the public.

O'Leary noted that “the fact that about 60% of our flights are booked on desktop computers” was disregarded in favour of the investigation's purported foundation in mobile phone pricing algorithms.