BWIA predicts brighter future

A BRIGHT FUTURE is dawning for BWIA and the national airline’s management is confident this future will become clearer following today’s special Cabinet meeting at Whitehall.

At yesterday’s post-Cabinet press conference, Prime Minister Patrick Manning announced that Cabinet will sit in special session today to deliberate upon BWIA’s future. At a news conference hours later at Sunjet House, BWIA officials were optimistic that brighter days were coming and revealed that by next Tuesday a total of $7, 271, 342 would have been paid out to the airline’s 471 retrenched workers. BWIA Vice-President (Employee Services) Hugh Henderson said that as of 2 pm yesterday, a total of $5,717, 342 had been paid to those workers.

“On April 7, all 471 people at the time were issued cheques that totalled $1.5 million. As of this afternoon of those 471 cheques, 191 have been collected. We still have 280 cheques outstanding. On Monday April 14, seven cheques of $50,000 each were issued to the first seven people who were actually severed in December. On Tuesday coming, we will repeat the exercise of another $1.5 million,” he said.

Henderson denied claims that BWIA was in breach of the law in its method of severance payment and the company was working expeditiously to address the employees’ concerns. BWIA Communications Director Clint Williams meanwhile was optimistic after today’s Cabinet meeting, the airline would be on a more stable footing because the company had made “an excellent sales pitch” to the Government. He said BWIA did not have “$38 million in a bag” to pay the retrenched workers and many lending agencies were hesitant about extending credit given the airline’s current situation..

Explaining that BWIA gets money to pay severance from its revenue streams, the BWIA director declared “there are no concrete assurances in the airline industry”. Williams added that the war in Iraq, SARS and possible terrorist threats have damaged the industry’s revenue stream and BWIA was only marginally better off than most of its competitors.  However Williams gave the assurance that BWIA was doing its best to pay the monies owed to the workers and said anyone who claimed there was corporate fraud in this exercise must be prepared to back up those claims in court.