LIAT’s major shareholders to meet today

MAJOR shareholders of the now liquidated LIAT airline which serviced most of the Caribbean islands and Guyana, are to meet today, July 20, 2020, even as the fate of its employees including pilots, flight attendants and other employees hangs in the balance.
Several of the airline’s employees, including flight attendants, are Guyanese. Some have since returned home and are on the breadline, while others are among several passengers who had travelled with the airline and booked flights to return home. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic-related closure of regional airports, including the Eugene F. Correia International Airport, Ogle, from where the airline operated in Guyana, the situation became further complicated.

A Caribbean News Service (CNS) article reported Prime Minister Gaston Browne of Antigua as saying that the shareholders have agreed to meet at 5pm today to discuss matters pertaining to winding down. This is one week after an earlier meeting that was set was not held because of the unavailability of Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley.

Antigua is LIAT’s largest shareholder and its headquarters. The others are St Vincent and the Grenadines and Dominica.
CNS in its report, also hinted at an apparent standoff between Barbados and Antigua with sources close to the situation telling the news agency of a refusal by Antigua to accede to a request to have three of its planes from LIAT’s fleet move to Barbados.
The three aircraft were reportedly purchased with funds borrowed from the Caribbean Development Bank (CDB) which is based in Barbados. The other remaining ATR aircraft are on lease from various lessors.

PM Browne reportedly said, “So it would appear that even though they agreed to meet that they have already come to the conclusion and that they have drawn a line in the sand, and are saying that LIAT should and will be wound up.
“In the likely or unlikely event that those discussions fail, Antigua and Barbuda will have no choice but to move immediately to take defensive action to protect LIAT from any brutish aggression to destroy it,” Browne added.

Meanwhile, former aviation minister and current political leader of the United Progressive Party (UPP) in Antigua, Harold Lovell, who supports the planes remaining in Antigua, is laying blame at the feet of Prime Minister Browne for the way things are playing out.
“What played out in public, that literally poisoned the well, that muddied the water, that made the whole thing like a schoolyard fight with Prime Minister Browne basically in vague language accusing Prime Minister Dr. Ralph Gonsalves of St Vincent of lying and that sort of thing,” Lovell was quoted as saying in the CNS article.

“If you speak with anybody with experience in these matters, they will tell you that whenever you see anything accomplished or achieved, it’s not achieved by people going on the radio and shouting. That spoils everything. My own feeling is that things went wrong once we started to have all this letter-writing and this statement about who stab who in back and who [is] treacherous. That is not how you get things done.
“Once the well was poisoned, once the water was muddied, you’re going to encourage a lot of people to go down that line. So, then the whole argument instead of being focused on finding a solution that Antigua and Barbuda can live with, a solution that Antigua and Barbuda can put on the table and get others to agree with, you now have public cussing and people taking attitude,” Lovell added.

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