{"id":1185,"date":"2020-04-10T12:16:15","date_gmt":"2020-04-10T12:16:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/demo6.aiwalls.com\/ipapps\/?p=1185"},"modified":"2020-04-10T12:16:15","modified_gmt":"2020-04-10T12:16:15","slug":"french-airline-shuts-down-after-court-rejects-bids","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.txd9.com\/?p=1185","title":{"rendered":"French airline shuts down after court rejects bids"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"No

\n No takeover bid was considered good enough
\n <\/figcaption>

A French commercial court on Friday ordered the shutdown of Aigle Azur, putting the 1,150 employees of the country’s second-biggest airline out of work after last-minute takeover offers failed to pass muster.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

“No long-term solution was proposed by the takeover candidates,” said Sonia Arrouas, the president of the court in Evry, near the Paris Orly airport where Aigle Azur is based.<\/p>\n

The stricken carrier, whose 11 planes fly mainly to Algeria, filed for bankruptcy on September 2 and later cancelled all flights as it sought a rescuer.<\/p>\n

Fourteen bidders initially came forward for all or parts of the airline, but none were deemed viable by the court, which gave them until Friday to improve their offers.<\/p>\n

But some candidates walked away, Arrouas said in a statement, while others lacked financing guarantees or were otherwise “inadmissible.”<\/p>\n

“This is a difficult decision to make because everything had been done to save these jobs,” she said.<\/p>\n

Labour unions had called earlier Friday for the French state to extend a bridge loan of 35 million euros ($38 million) to save the company, which they said was carrying 148 million euros of debt and other liabilities.<\/p>\n

Aigle Azur’s most coveted asset was its landing slots at Orly, which could have interested Air France, the country’s former flag carrier, as well as low-cost carriers like EasyJet and Vueling.<\/p>\n

The airline transported some 1.9 million passengers last year, with destinations in Algeria making up half of its operations that brought in 300 million euros of revenue.<\/p>\n

But it wasn’t enough to stem heavy losses.<\/p>\n

Its collapse comes just days after a fellow French airline, XL, also sought bankruptcy protection after failing to reach a deal with potential buyers.<\/p>\n

XL, based at Paris’ Charles de Gaulle airport, employs 750 people and transports 700,000 passengers a year, mainly on long-haul flights to the Antilles, the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean and the United States.<\/p>\n

A commercial court in the Paris suburb of Bobigny has set a deadline of Saturday at noon for takeover bids.<\/p>\n

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No takeover bid was considered good enough A French commercial court on Friday ordered the shutdown of Aigle Azur, putting the 1,150 employees of the<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1186,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[831,556,555,908,907],"class_list":["post-1185","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-airline","tag-court","tag-french","tag-rejects","tag-shuts"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.txd9.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1185","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.txd9.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.txd9.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.txd9.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.txd9.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1185"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.txd9.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1185\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.txd9.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1186"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.txd9.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1185"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.txd9.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1185"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.txd9.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1185"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}