AIR SEYCHELLES IS LATE AGAIN
Exactly one year to the month since it closed its financial year in 2005, Air Seychelles has only now - it appears - been able to get its annual report back from the printers in Dubai. Is this evidence of the ‘respect’ that the CEO of Air Seychelles, Captain David Savy, has for the people of Seychelles who owns the airline that he runs.
Without anyone else in Seychelles being able to read the annual report for his or herself and make his or her own judgment, Mr Savy has for the second time in the last twelve months highlighted aspects of his own report to the government controlled media and to make his self serving comments about it, which they report faithfully.
We are now approaching the end of March 2006. So whatever Mr Savy was peddling was worthless information. During the last twelve months a lot has happened in the world, especially in the turbulent commercial world of aviation. What the public wants to know is how Air Seychelles coped?
By highlighting out of date information Mr Savy is giving the distinct impression that he is hiding bad news from us. Last year he signed an agreement to collect Air Mauritius passengers from London taking them to Mauritius. This was not because one of Air Mauritius planes was flying. Rather, it allowed Air Mauritius to sell more seats than it has the capacity to carry while it gets the equivalent of chartering an additional plane without its attendant commercial risks.
In the perspective of cold commercial considerations, the Seychelles as a tourist destination rivalling Mauritius is now providing succour to the Mauritian tourism industry while it is itself in decline. Air Seychelles, realising that it did not get enough bums to fill seats to carry to Seychelles because of ill conceived economic policies that have destroyed our competitiveness vis-à-vis Mauritius, decided instead to carry surplus bums to Mauritius.
It would not have mattered if Air Seychelles was a private company. But Air Seychelles owes it existence to subsidies and commercial guarantees provided by our government. Once again the Seychellois public is made to carry the burden of incompetent decision makers.
Meanwhile, we will have to wait another year before David Savy tells us in snippets of information, how the parastatal under his control had fared the year before.
(Contributed)
