BWIA boss walks
Stabroek News
June 1, 2003
(Trinidad Guardian) BWIA president Conrad Aleong offered a verbal resignation late Thursday night, hours after Prime Minister Patrick Manning made an immediate restructuring of BWIA’s management a condition of further state support for the airline.
Aleong’s resignation was accepted with regret by the BWIA Board, which will make a statement on the latest development at the national carrier tomorrow.
Aleong will also tender a formal resignation letter tomorrow.
BWIA sources said it was not clear who would lead the struggling airline after Aleong, but it was pointed out that Beatrix Carrington, BWIA’s current vice president of sales and marketing, was considered to be the airline’s most senior executive after Aleong.
Carrington, a German citizen, runs BWIA’s marketing department from Barbados, where the Manning administration is looking for financial and other support for the airline.
Manning told a post-Cabinet news conference on Thursday that certain regional governments had given commitments to support a new regional airline based in the southern Caribbean.
The other option for interim management of the airline would be for the BWIA Board to nominate one of its members as an executive chairman during the period of restructuring.
The airline’s acting chairman is attorney Anthony Jacelon, a well-respected Senior Counsel and former Minister of Finance in a previous PNM administration.
BWIA’s titular chairman, Lawrence Duprey, said on Wednesday that he was too busy building his own global company to have attended any of BWIA’s recent crisis board meetings. The airline is expected to start the restructuring process almost immediately, with a four-month window to report on its progress.
BWIA’s main aircraft lessor, International Lease Finance Co, on Thursday agreed to release two impounded 737s and give the airline until the end of September to put its finances in order.
Government is also hoping to complete the due diligence exercise to tally BWIA’s debts and start the process of the establishment of a regional airline within this period.
One of the first orders of business for the new management team would be to meet and reach some agreement with BWIA’s other creditors, who are owed an estimated US$100 million.
Also high on the agenda would be a rebuilding of the flying public’s shattered confidence in BWIA, which went to the brink of closing down on Tuesday. Aleong did not return any messages requesting an interview on Thursday night, after the late-afternoon post- Cabinet briefing announcement by Manning.
Manning did not say whether he had asked the BWIA Board to order the airline’s chief executive officer Conrad Aleong, or any of its other executives, to resign.
Meanwhile, BWIA spokesman Clint Williams said the two seized aircraft should return to service early this week.
We are looking at having the first aircraft in service by Sunday [today] and the second by Monday [tomorrow], he said.
Williams anticipated BWIA mechanics to be in Miami by yesterday, to conduct ground maintenance of the aircraft before the arrival of the pilots, who will fly them back to Trinidad.
