Qantas bidders to rejig proposal
A report by Steve Creedy in The Australian today says that the partners involved in the $11 billion bid for Qantas are due to hold a teleconference early this morning to approve an extension of the bid and possibly a revised offer for the airline which will lower the acceptance level from 90% to 75%.
The extension, likely to be longer than the two weeks added last time, must be approved by this morning’s telephone link-up to prevent the automatic closure of the bid next week.
The consortium last night was still hoping to lodge a supplementary bidder’s statement covering the revised deal at the same time as the extension, but an Airline Partners Australia (APA) spokesman could not guarantee this would happen.
However, one source said it was “80% certain” that a supplementary bidder’s statement would be lodged today.
The lower equity stake will give the APA consortium a platform from which to work for a complete takeover and delisting of the airline and to sidestep dissident shareholders preventing it from reaching the 90 per cent compulsory acquisition point.
APA began reaching in-principle agreements with its six primary lenders last weekend and has spent this week finalising the details and dealing with underwriters.
A Qantas board meeting in Sydney yesterday discussed developments but took no new action, with a source close to the board saying the members would like to see the bid finalised as quickly as possible but still supported the bid as a good offer and accepted that bidders needed time to realise it.
The revised bid also failed to prompt the mass walkout of executives predicted by some media outlets, a senior Qantas source saying no one in the management group was concerned about the new bid or suggestions that it could void incentive packages giving senior executives up to 5.5% of the airline.
But unions again raised an alarm about the takeover’s impact on jobs after Qantas announced it was seeking another 150 voluntary redundancies from flight attendants, with Qantas saying the move was an extension of a voluntary redundancy program that started last year, but the Flight Attendants Association of Australia (FAAA) said the move was a sign of things to come under the new owners.
It said the move came in the wake of two Qantas profit upgrades since the APA bid was announced and followed the loss of almost 400 long-haul jobs last year and 1200 since 2000.
FAAA international division secretary Michael Mijatov said Qantas had not given a rationale for the redundancies but the union believed it was an attempt to transfer full-time jobs to short-haul and overseas-based flight attendants who were more highly casualised and cheaper, but Qantas Executive General Manager John Borghetti said no one would be sacked and there were flight attendants who would welcome the voluntary deal.
Report by The Mole from The Australian
John Alwyn-Jones
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