Leber - terribly interesting information that - are you saying that our late and unlamented Minister of Transport, Dr Piet J Welgemoed might be related to Joggie Vermooten? Poor chap!!
I was CEO of Lionair at the time, and had been in negotiations with Derek Lawrence and Buddy Hawton since October 1993 regarding the amalgamation of the various operations. The game plan was that they would buy the Rentmeester Beleggings holdings, return the A320s to GPA; replace them with B727s in all-business configuration (like the old British Midland Diamond Service). We would operate B727s in cattle-class configuration; and Safair would operate B727 freighters - that would give us commonality in spares, training, etc etc.
I started to get fobbed off by them in March, and sent a fax to Buddy, copied to Derek, on the 10th April 1994 - as I'd heard a few rumours about the shutdown. They both said that things were on course, and I should hold on. At the same time, I obtained a 'Deep Throat' within the Safren heirarchy who told me:
a) The airline would be closed down the following day
b) The company had agreed to return the A320s to GPA in JANUARY(!!) and that they had now been placed with Vietnam Airlines - consequently GPA was not going to hit them for damages.
c) SAA had agreed with the Trek Airways (Pty) Ltd shareholders (Rentmeester, Safren and the de Moelenaer family) that they would be paid R198m to 'cease operating any airline service in competition with the State Airline' for a period of five years. This was one of the reasons Safair had to shut down its cargo operation - which was using 146's at the time - because it counted as an airline service competing with SAA.
On the 11th, following the closure of Flitestar, I put out a press release to every newspaper and TV station in South Africa. Within 30 minutes, I received a fax from Rentmeester's attorneys - some outfit in Pretoria with a name like Wildebeeste van der Merwe denying absolutely that any of this was true; saying that my release was full of factual errors. When challenged on this, they said that I had said that Jan Blake was at Premier Milling when in fact he was at Tiger Oats (or vice versa, I can't remember!) - so I put out a further release correcting it.
Anyway, this dragged on for a further couple of days, and Hawton eventually admitted the whole thing on th 8pm SABC news. Shortly afterwards, I received a further fax from Wildebeeste van der Merwe saying they had ben istructed by their clients to sue me for libel and defamation - I replied saying that they were flogging a dead horse as one of their client's biggest shareholders had admitted the whole thing to an audience of millions and can I have an apology, please?
Needless to say, I am still waiting!
Incidentally, as a footnote, Rennies Travel owns Trek Airways now - it's the company that they used to rent their Premier Club lounges at JNB, DUR and CPT.
The whole think smacked of the ABSA/Trust Bank type attitude of "we are big and well connected and we can do whatever we want to whoever we want".
I discussed the whole thing with Martin Weitz at Noseweek a few years back - and even he thought that as potatoes go, this was a hot one - but if we could get documentary proof (which I wasn't able to do as I had lost touch with 'Deep Throat' in the interim) then he could blow it out of the water.
Under new, non Broederbond/Mason control, one would think that SAA was clean. Nope. First, you have the affirmative 'jobs for the boys'. Then you have mega-scale fraud and theft going on - how many hundred million rands/dollars worth of spares - including engines!! - have 'walked' from SAA Technical? Then there was the infamous SAA Cargo scandal where everyone was nicked in dawn raids by the Office of Serious Economic Offences - and it was discovered that an alleges 'client' - Morgan Air Services - was in fact owned and controlled by SAA Cargo staff, who were passing on all the juicy contracts and leasing capacity at cost or below - such as the fish flights from CPT to VIT.
One wonders if Swissair knew this sort of stuff before they bought their holdings in SAA - and if they did, how does that reflect on that well known Swiss probity?
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Happiness is VR at Lagos!