Air Afrique buys time

The airline is effectively bankrupt

By Elizabeth Blunt in Abidjan

The beleaguered West African regional airline Air Afrique has won a last-minute reprieve.

An Abidjan summit meeting of the French-speaking West African countries which jointly own the airline has ruled out suggestions that it should be put into liquidation.

Only four of the airline's owners came to the meeting in person

As he left the meeting, Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade said that instead they had decided to talk to possible strategic partners and to ask all the countries involved to put up enough money to buy some time from their creditors.

The news was greeted with relief by the airline's staff.

Mr Wade reported that the agreement was made in principle but the amount each country would pay had not yet been fixed.

Bankrupt

Air Afrique is effectively bankrupt and its creditors have become extremely pressing.

It is now very close to losing its remaining planes, which would mean stopping flying altogether.

Mr Wade told journalists that they had listened to a proposal by the American interim administrator, Jeffrey Erickson, who was appointed earlier this year by the World Bank, and had decided to extend his mandate to give the plan a chance.

Erickson is the former chief executive of failed US airline TWA

A source close to Mr Erickson said earlier that he was proposing an ambitious business plan which would let Air Afrique break away from its current concentration on routes between West Africa and France and develop into a south-south airline linking the region to other parts of Africa, and eventually to Asia and Latin America.

This, he believed, would be attractive to commercial partners and financially viable.

Strategic partners

President Wade said they were actively seeking partners and spoke particularly of Air France, which already holds shares in Air Afrique.

He also said they were planning to bring in a firm of international accountants to sort out the airline's financial management.

Air Afrique staff waiting anxiously outside the meeting hall were triumphant when they heard what President Wade had said.

But although he said there would be no mass sackings, he did warn that there were likely to be voluntary redundancies and early retirements as the management tried to get the right staff for what it wanted to do.