The ill-fated November 27th incident which saw a Toronto-bound Fly Jamaica Boeing 757 aircraft skid off the runway at the Cheddi Jagan International Airport, Timehri as the pilots attempted an emergency landing marked the start of a controversy-strewn interlude to which, more than two years later, there would seem to be no end.
Today, the administrators of the company which, while in service was rarely if ever far away from service-related passenger complaints and controversy, are fighting a battle of attrition, no less, to keep creditors at bay as it seeks to take what now appears to be the decidedly doubtful road of remaining in business, or else, securing a sale for its remaining assets and bringing an end to its protracted woes.
Earlier this year it had seemed that a deal had been reached with a group of investors seeking to acquire the company from its founder, Guyanese, Ronald Reece. That appears to have unraveled swiftly. Most recently, and staring down the proverbial barrel of a gun in the form of hundreds of creditors determined to ‘collect’ from what is left from the airline, a beleaguered Fly Jamaica announced that it was preparing a proposal on which its creditors would be invited to vote in order to bring an end to the long-running saga.
The procedure, as explained recently by a spokesperson for the company, is that “since Fly Jamaica has filed a Notice of Intention, [with the Office of Insolvency on October 29] they had an initial 30 days to put together a proposal that they were going to present to creditors who will then vote on it so that they can either accept or reject. They have been given an extension for that initial 30 days so the new date [for the realisation of the proposal] will be January 14, 2020.” Whether the proposal, if it materialises, will serve as a magic bullet to bring at least this phase of the company’s woes to an end is unclear. That will be determined by the votes of an as yet unknown number of creditors who are straining at the leash to collect from Fly Jamaica.
A Sunday December 15 story published in the Jamaica Gleaner has made reference to “259 creditors, who are owed US$21.86 million,” though, with claims still reportedly arriving on the Trustee’s doorstep, that list is reportedly far from exhaustive. The Trustee is reportedly preoccupied with encouraging further creditors to come forward with their claims in order that a clear picture of the company’s indebtedness can emerge, the Gleaner says.
What had appeared earlier this year to be a near ‘done deal’ to get Fly Jamaica airborne again appeared to unravel swiftly after a buyer team, led by the French firm W&L SAS, which had reportedly said, initially, that they planned to have Fly Jamaica up and running by last September appeared to pull the plug on the deal.
Faced with a hefty class action lawsuit in the wake of the accident and in the face of mounting debts and no revenue presently accruing, there has now arisen the likelihood that even if and when the company’s assets are liquidated the creditors are likely to get less than what they might have anticipated. Further, up to this juncture there is still no indication as to whether the completion of the proposal on which the airline’s creditors will be asked to vote will be completed within the January 2020 time frame.
