The regional owners of Leeward Islands Air Transport (LIAT) airline revealed in a joint statement that the airline is facing liquidation. They said the airline may come under a new owner and management, and this is largely because the airline had been struggling for years to remain profitable. The current COVID-19 pandemic also dealt a fatal blow to the viability of the airline, necessitating a sell-off to another willing investor.
Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit said Dominica as one of the major shareholders in LIAT will support any new iteration of the airline, noting that government support for the continuous operation of the airline under a new management is essential for interregional travel. Other major shareholders in LIAT include Barbados, Antigua & Barbuda, and St. Vincent & the Grenadines.
“I am convinced as a regionalist/integrationist that whatever new entity comes up, that the people of Dominica must provide whatever support within their means, to ensure that we have interregional travel,” Skerrit said. “LIAT has shown its capacity, its abilities, obviously confronting challenges pre-COVID and [which] certainly worsened in the COVID period.”
PM Skerrit confessed that “LIAT 1974 Ltd has served Dominica well,” but and the entire Caribbean had benefitted immensely from its services over the years.
Chairman of the Caribbean government owners of LIAT, Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, in a statement noted that given the current coronavirus situation around the world, “major shareholders are unable to give LIAT [the] needed support” even though they had been doing this before. He made it clear that “the board of directors and major shareholders agree that the airline cannot survive this [COVID-19] crisis”.
According to PM Gonsalves, the airline is even owing its staff several months of salaries and severance pay, and this is estimated at EC$94 million.
“A general meeting of all the ordinary shareholders and creditors will be called for the purpose of considering the closure of the airline,” Gonsalves said. “A most important priority of the airline is the welfare of the staff. The payment of your outstanding salaries and severance will be urgently addressed in this process.”
LIAT airlines has 10 aircrafts in its fleet and the Barbados-based Caribbean Development Bank owns three of these.
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