It came right
down to the wire, but finance minister Pravin Gordhan appears to have won his
battle against the chair of the SAA board having secured the Airbus swap deal
and saving SAA from an estimated R1-billion in impairments.
Late on Monday
night the National Treasury announced, through a statement, that the South
African Airways board had approved the execution of a swap transaction with
Airbus – in which a deal to purchase ten A320 aircraft will be swapped for a
lease of five A330-300 aircraft – and that “a process is underway to conclude
it within the next few days”.
This arrangement,
Treasury said, will save the financially distressed SAA from an estimated
R1-billion in impairments and will also result in $100-million cash refund for
the national carrier.
There was a great deal of urgency to
conclude this process, as the deadline extended by Airbus was Monday 21
December – by when either an new deal
was approved, or pre-delivery payments of $40-billion to the aircraft manufacturer
became due.
Treasury indicated that an extension has been granted. “Airbus has indicated that they are
amenable to the implementation of the transaction and have required that all
legal documentation be in place by 28 December 2015,” the statement said.
“The
National Treasury will work closely with Airbus and SAA to finalise the swap
transaction.”
The timing of the shock removal of
Nhlanhla Nene from his post as finance minister two weeks ago was widely
speculated to have been linked to the 21 December Airbus deadline.
Nene and the SAA board chair Dudu
Myeni failed to agree on the structure of the new transaction. Myeni has close
ties to President Jacob Zuma, who two weeks ago unilaterally made the decision
to remove Nene and replace him with parliamentary back-bencher David van
Rooyen.
Markets quickly whipped into a frenzy
and the rand plummeted sharply past R15 to the US Dollar. So severe was the
reaction that, four days later, Zuma announced that Van Rooyen would no longer
head up Treasury and instead would be replaced by the fiscally-frugal Pravin
Gordhan.
Because of the looming deadline,
Gordhan’s first matter at hand was addressing the structure of the new Airbus
deal – and getting Myeni to sign off on it.
As Mail & Guardian reported last
week SAA documents explained how, in 2017, the airline had been due to take delivery of ten A320
narrow-body aircraft from Airbus, part of a legacy contract dating back to
2002. SAA had to make payments to Airbus in advance of the delivery.
More than a decade later, the terms had become onerous. Price escalations meant
SAA was being forced to buy the planes at higher than market rates, fast eroding
its already weak balance sheet, according to other SAA documents.
As SAA ran
out of cash this year, it could not afford to make the payments to Airbus, some
of which were already overdue. And for every month it was overdue Airbus could
set back the delivery date and charge interest. The contract was one of the key factors driving the airline to bankruptcy, sources had told the M&G.
In April this year the Board of SAA
applied for approval from Nene to cancel the purchase of ten A320 aircraft and
instead enter into an operating lease on five A330-300 aircraft with Airbus.
During July 2015 he approved this request.
But in November, SAA applied for
permission to amend the transaction to allow SAA to purchase the A330-300
aircraft and enter into a sale and lease back deal with one or many local
lessors. SAA argued that one of the benefits of this transaction structure would
be a mitigation of the airline’s exposure to exchange rate fluctuations.
On 3 December 2015 Nene rejected the
fresh amendments to the swap transaction structure. “Whist acknowledging that
SAA might have benefited from entering into the local leasing arrangement,
Minister Nene highlighted that the terms of the local leasing transaction
remained speculative and there was considerable risk that the local leasing
arrangement would not be in place by the time the A330 purchase contract was
concluded with Airbus, at which point SAA would be required to pay $100-million
in pre-delivery payments,” Treasury explained.
It was likely that the airline would
not have the cash resources available to make such a payment, resulting in it
defaulting on its obligations, triggering cross-defaults on other leasing
arrangements and SAA’s government guaranteed debt obligations, resulting in “severe
negative consequences for SAA and for the country as a whole”, Treasury said.
Immediately after his appointment Gordhan gave
SAA an opportunity to make further representation, following which he decided
that the airline must go ahead with executing the A320/A330 swap as had been
approved in July 2015.
“The implementation of the transaction
will therefore improve the airline’s financial position by alleviating the
cash flow pressure and improving its profitability,” Treasury said. “Further
measures will be taken next year to stabilise the airline.”
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