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With colossal legal and market power, the Competition Commission has to be whiter than the driven stuff currently whistling past my office window.

So the ruling on BAA's airport portfolio is profoundly embarrassing for it.

In short, the Commission wanted to force more competition into the airports market, by forcing BAA to sell Gatwick and Stansted near London, and either Edinburgh or Glasgow.

Its argument was that the company has too much market share.

More than 6 in 10 British airport passenger arrivals and departures have been at BAA airports, rising to 9 in 10 in and around London (before Gatwick was sold) and 8 in 10 in Scotland.

Today, three members of the Competition Appeals Tribunal unanimously ruled that a member of the Commission panel assessing the case for breaking up BAA could be seen as having a conflict of interest, or "apparent bias", in the language of the ruling.

That's not actual bias. But it looks bad.

You could argue that the links were tenuous. Professor Peter Moizer, an accounting expert at Leeds University Business School, was taking a modest fee (£12,600) from the Greater Manchester Pension Fund in return for strategic advice, and some specific investment consultancy.

Worth £9 billion last year, the fund is a big investor. It handles public sector pensions across many of the services provided within ten local authority areas, by far the biggest being Manchester City Council.

They're the same ten councils that own Manchester Airport Group, which not only owns the Mancunian aerodrome, but also those at Bournemouth, East Midland and a stake in Humberside.

They've also made clear that they're interested in some opportunistic shopping for new airport assets, explictly saying they were in the market for bits of BAA that fall off the carousel once the Competition Commission had done with it.

And the natural place for Manchester Airport Group to look for financing acquisitions would be the neighbourhood pension pot.

So Prof Moiser could have been in a position to drive for the break-up of BAA, to the benefit of a company owned by the same councils whose pension funds he advised, for a very modest fee.

And he pulled out of the Competition Commission process before the final decisions were made.

That's a tenuous link, yes. The odd bit is that he raised the potential conflict of interest when it cropped up seven years ago - yet it didn't seem to be such a big problem this time round.

It's a big problem now, as it's left BAA in limbo, and the Competition Commission unsure whether it can or should try for the ruling by other means.

The tribunal members ruled... "with the greatest reluctance. We have throughout been very conscious of their implications for the Report which followed a detailed inquiry over a period of two years, at great effort and expense to all concerned".

The next step is for a hearing, expected early-ish in the New Year, when it becomes clearer whether the Commission can tackle the airport competition issues again, and if so, how far back in the process it has to go.

With Gatwick transferring out of BAA ownership (before it was forced), and handed over to Global Infrastructure Partners on 3 December, the other interesting thing to watch will be how it differentiates itself from its BAA rival at Heathrow.

If passengers using two major London hubs can see differences in price and the quality of their experience, that would make the Competition Commission's task easier in forcing an eventual sale of either Glasgow or Edinburgh.

The best bit of the news for BAA is that it has more breathing space to find buyers, at a time when asset prices may have recovered a bit. It had argued against the Competition Commission's requirement that the sell-offs in Scotland and London should take place within two years, or else a trustee would be put in place to sell on BAA's behalf.

That's one argument it lost.