Originally Posted by
neville_nobody
Let me guess, the cost of the ground equipment affected someones budget and therefore their bonus but they could pay workers comp forever without impunity.
Someone should write a book on all the stupid short term self serving decisions made by airline management. It would be quite interesting.
Well, it's no surprise in that organisation, since 'Sir Peter' ordered the A320, an aircraft that had the same mission as the 737-300 and then ordered the 737-300 as well.
And you're probably correct, it was the capex element but the stupid thing about that is their accountants were obviously morons as said ground equipment would have provided an ongoing deduction against profits based on depreciation.
By that point though I suspect the owners of AN in that era (pre-Air NZ) were well into their asset stripping program, TV Stations, Land, Newspapers, all removed from Ansett Holdings and aircraft bought to leverage TNT's entry into Europe.
I can't remember where but I read many years ago about how the entire DC-9 fleet which had a 'written down value' of $600K per airframe, was sold to a shelf company in a tax haven for that value, then on-sold for their individual market value of $6M per airframe. I'll leave it up to people to guess who the TWO owners of the alleged 'shelf-company in a tax haven' were.......
I'm not sure that happens today (it would be illegal in a public company) but certainly manipulation of the market occurs via so-called share buybacks. Buy-backs used to be illegal in the United States until "W" came along because they were considered by the FEC and the Treasury to be market manipulation.
They still are.