CYPRUS Airways (CY) vice chairman Achilleas Kyprianou said last night that the strategic plan the board yesterday decided to implement was not enough to save the national carrier.
Kyprianou, who has served on the CY board for 12 years, was responding to criticism levelled at him yesterday after Simerini newspaper published confidential letters he had written to the ministers of finance and communications and works suggesting a total restructuring of the airline.
The letters were interpreted as suggesting CY be closed down and a new company set up along the lines of CY’s low-cost charter firm Eurocypria. CY chairman Constantinos Loizides said the board had not been informed and called the letter “ignorant”.
Speaking to the Cyprus News Agency last night, Kyprianou said his words had been twisted, but insisted the rescue package was not enough to save the airline.
The package that is being implemented is a watered down version of the original plan drawn up with the help of foreign experts, which called for heavy redundancies and cost cutting. The unions rejected the initial plan outright and months of negotiations led to a compromise put together with the help of the Labour Minister’s mediation.
“It was already known by the board of directors that this plan was not enough to save the company,” Kyprianou said. “This is the reason why the board and the responsible ministers characterise the plan as a first step.”
Kyprianou denied that the letters suggested replacing CY with a Eurocypria-type airline.
“The objective of all of us is the survival of Cyprus Airways but on the other hand I consider it to be exceptionally unfair the way what I have written was twisted,” he said.
He said what he wrote in the letters was no more than what had been discussed within the CY board, based on the strategic plans of experts going back as far as 1994 and 1997.
Loizides said the letters were not representative of the board or the company. “These were opinions, ideas and views that were clearly personal and had nothing to do with the company,” he said.
Asked to comment on Kyprianou’s claim that the plan being implemented was not enough, Loizides said: “The government hears the decisions and opinions of the board and not the individual opinions of others,” he added.
Costas Demetriou, the president of CYNIKA , the airline’s largest union, said the letters had been a bit mistake and the only reason Kyprianou was in CY in the first place was due to being the son of late President Spyros Kyprianou.
“A member of the board should follow the majority and not impose his personal opinions. If he wasn’t the son of Spyros Kyprianou I don’t believe he would be in the position he is,” he said.
According to what was reported in Simerini Kyprianou had suggested radical changes to CY because even with the compromise proposal, the airline would still collapse in 2005.
It quoted Kyprianou as saying a new low-cost company should be set up and personnel cut back to 800, with dozens of services the airline needs to come from outsourcing.
