DESPITE LIAT’S DESPERATION for investor dollars, it wants no “buccaneers” coming to buy any part of its fleet.
?This is the view of chairman of the airline’s four shareholder countries, Dr Ralph Gonsalves, who revealed that many letters came to LIAT offering investment in the 58-year-old cash-strapped airline, but many of them were from people of dubious repute.
“I don’t want any buccaneer to write me about any involvement in this matter. You have a lot of private sector buccaneers, not of any reputable type, holding out that they have $200 million and $300 million from some entity somewhere in Europe, Kazakhstan or Azerbaijan or some place. No buccaneers write me and I reply to them,” he told journalists at the end of a meeting of LIAT shareholders at Hilton Barbados Thursday.
“I want serious people with serious proposals. And believe me, we get a lot of letters from buccaneering types, and when they can’t succeed, they take to the Internet and say that we are stupid and we don’t want to have any investors coming,” he added.
Gonsalves, who is also prime minister of St Vincent and the Grenadines, said he had always told people, especially private sector critics, that if they believed they could make money in LIAT, then they should become an equity partner.
“Put your money where your mouth is . . . . Everybody wants to talk about LIAT, but a number of these persons don’t want to have an authoritative position to speak about it. Being a chief executive officer of a company or the prime minister of a country which is not a shareholder doesn’t give you the right to talk authoritatively about LIAT,” Gonsalves insisted.
In terms of competition, he said LIAT had absolutely no quarrel with anyone who wished to compete but noted that the playing field had to be fair.
“Follow the laws of the land, follow the regulations and, very importantly, the multilateral air services agreement of 1997 signed by CARICOM countries, which is under review,” he said, noting that vices like predatory pricing, mimicking of schedules and unlawful subsidies must be ruled out. (RJ)
