Ireland's High Court has formally approved a survival plan allowing CityJet (WX, Dublin International) to successfully exit examinership. It allows the airline to continue as a going concern on what has been described as a “slimmed-down” basis.
The regional carrier will retain more than 400 jobs out of around 1,100 people employed before the current crisis, the Irish Times reported. That includes 140 out of 400 jobs in Dublin.
The rest of the retained jobs are mostly at Copenhagen Kastrup, where CityJet continues to operate six of its twenty-eight CRJ900LRs for SAS Scandinavian Airlines. The rest of its fleet, twenty-two CRJs and four ARJ-85s, remain inactive, according to the ch-aviation fleets module.
“The airline is confident of recruiting again once market conditions improve,” a company spokesman said.
A majority of the airline’s creditors and shareholders have approved the plan, in which tens of millions of euros of debt are to be written off. The scheme gives most creditors dividends ranging between 15% and 1.25%.
High Court judge Justice Michael Quinn said at the end of July that he would formally approve the plan after arrangements with creditors were completed and changes to the airline’s constitution were implemented.
On August 11, he declared that he was satisfied that these arrangements and changes had been made, and so he approved the scheme, which had been assembled by the airline’s examiner, Kieran Wallace of KPMG.
The airline sought the protection of the courts in April blaming the coronavirus outbreak. It said at the time that it had debts of EUR500 million euros (USD588 million) and a net deficit of liabilities over assets of EUR186 million (USD220 million).
