As per latest business report, beleaguered Kingfisher Airlines is seeking repayment of its debts by selling assets held against their loans raising scope of outside investment.
Loosing the hopes of lenders, as per source, one of Kingfisher‘s lenders, ICICI Bank has sold about 4 billion rupees of the Kingfisher Airlines’s assets against debts to a debt fund managed by the Kolkata-based Srei Infrastructure Finance on Monday.
“We have recovered the entire debt exposure of Rs. 430 crore and currently we do not have any debt exposure to the Kingfisher Airlines,” ICICI Bank official told media persons.
Moreover, after selling a part of carrier as “a fully secured debt” still India’s second largest lender ICICI have around 3 per cent stake, while 14 lenders to Kingfisher hold 21 per cent stake jointly in the airline, reports suggested.
CMO Vijay Mallya’s airline KFA, had India’s No. 2 airline by domestic market share a year ago, has been fighting for its smooth operating, being burdened of Rs. 7,500 crore loans and frozen banks accounts due to non payments of tax.
Even there are no sources of raising funds for its working capital from banks. A large section of its employees including 200 pilots are on strike over non-payment of their salaries for the past five months.
Due to disruption of flights operations because of strike, its ATR-operations have been cancelled along with several flights include Mumbai-Chennai, Mumbai-Mangalore and Mumbai-Khajuraho due to non-availability of pilots, sources said.
However, a meeting of all employees, including pilots, engineers and cabin crew, has been hold in Mumbai on Monday in way to resolve the issue, but no result has come out.
“More than 200 pilots, including captains, are on a strike as the airline has once again failed to pay salaries to the staff. The employees had a meeting with airline chairman Vijay Mallya on the issue, but after he failed to commit anything on the salary payment, the pilots decided to stop work,” airline sources said, as per source report.
