Europe's largest budget airline, Ryanair, said on Wednesday it had complained to the European Commission about what it called Air France's attempt to stop it from using an airport in Marseille.

Ryanair has already complained to Europe's top antitrust authority about Air France, claiming the French airline had received almost EUR1 billion (USD$1.26 billion) in state aid.

"This is the latest in a long line of abuses by Air France to protect their stranglehold on the French market," Ryanair's head of regulatory affairs, Jim Callaghan, said in a statement released in Brussels on Wednesday and first announced on Tuesday.

The Commission said it had not yet received the complaint and that it was still investigating Ryanair's previous complaint.

Air France had no immediate comment.

Ryanair last month named Marseille, in the south of France, as its first base in the country. The airline plans to station two aircraft there that will serve 10 European cities and three destinations in Morocco from November.

But the Dublin-based company said Air France was now challenging the airport in France's highest administrative court.

"Apparently they're complaining that we're paying less than they are," Ryanair's Callaghan said, adding however that he had yet to see the action filed by Air France.

"France is one of the few, if not the only, European countries where the national carrier has almost complete dominance over the domestic market and they're trying to retain that dominance," he said.

The Irish group has itself fallen foul of European competition laws -- the Commission said it had received state aid in Belgium at Charleroi Airport and last October opened an investigation into its use of a Finnish terminal.