Crisis for the loss-making Kingfisher Airlines deepened on Thursday when it failed to convince the striking employees to join back work as it tries to clear payment of part of their overdue salaries. Further, the airlines? company secretary and compliance officer, Bharath Raghavan, announced his resignation with effect from September 30.
The carrier has been grounded for the last five days. Though in a meeting with the directorate general of civil aviation (DGCA) on Tuesday, the company?s CEO Sanjay Aggarwal had assured that flights would be resumed by Friday and the salaries of would be cleared in the next few days, the carrier has neither approached DGCA with an operational plan nor managed to get employees on board to restart operations. In fact, its talks with the employees on both Wednesday and Thursday collapsed completely.
According to some of the employees, who were a part of the meeting, the airline officials have told them that it does not have money to clear off the dues. The engineers and pilots remain adamant that they won?t rejoin work till their salary dues are cleared and said they don?t trust the management.
?The talks in Delhi have also failed. The meeting in Delhi was attended by few of our colleagues as we don?t have faith in the management,? said a representative of the agitating employees.
?The management has failed to give any commitment towards when the salaries will be paid,? he added.
Civil aviation minister Ajit Singh said, ?It is an unfortunate incident. But there are no legal provisions for the ministry to shut down any private enterprise because they?re not paying salaries.? The ministry is also trying to work out legalities as there is a partial lock-out in place.
?Vijay Mallya has not communicated anything to the ministry. We are looking at how much we can intervene legally,? Singh said.
What?s worse is that the DGCA, in its interim report sent to the aviation ministry, has raised questions about Kingfisher?s flight safety and financial mess. A senior DGCA official said that the report was based on their (DGCA and Sanjay Aggarwal) meeting on Tuesday. ?They have not sent any response or input after that,? said the official adding that the ?safety issues arise from the fact that the carrier does not have enough certified engineers?.
A government official said that the aviation regulator has even asked the airline to stop taking bookings till it comes out with an operational plan. Although the airline has stopped taking bookings till Oct 7, it is still offering services from Oct 8 onwards.
The DGCA on Tuesday had said that the airline would not be allowed to fly unless every flight was cleared by certified engineers.
Kingfisher?s vice-president of corporate affairs Sanjay Bahadur maintained that about 100 people have agreed to return to work unconditionally and the carrier expects to pay salaries for March within a week or so.