More stupid questions...
We have evidence piled up knee-high of unpaid wages, unpaid bills, total chaos in general at Arik yet what must be a billion dollars worth of Boeings are still listed on the order books.
If Arik is liquid then why do they not pay their bills as normal companies do? Okay, many pay late but this reads like doing a moonlight flit from a hotel, out the back door and off in the crew bus with no plans to pay the owings ever, pretty bush stuff really.
Never mind stiffing a hotel or two, how about the unpaid wages? That really sends a message, doesn't it?
I think it suits Boeing to carry these orders on their books but would you like to bet that there have been some serious discussions, well hidden from public view, about how they might as well forget Arik as a serious customer for such things as the 787 as things now stand?
Okay, the paperwork is all in order, signatures on the dotted lines, so that Boeing has nothing to fear from the SEC about pumping up the order book with hot air to keep their stock price up. After all, it is not their fault if this or that customer proves unable to come up with the readies at the appointed time. Then they just feign disappointment, knock the order on the head and keep the deposit to carry on from there, not an unheard of thing in the airplane business.
The next act should see the sudden collapse of Arik and the even suddener disappearance of the topshots of Arik to cooler climes (London W1 is very nice in autumn, I hear) for a decent interval while the dust rises and then settles, a board of inquiry is called loudly to life but then quietly laid to rest, a tenth if that much of the purloined money is paid back, ferry crews appear to take back the grounded birds after the usual struggle with local courts and the disappointed staff chase their unpaid wages through the Nigerian legal system.
The final act? Why, the return of the raskols, all forgiven and forgotten in the true Nigerian manner! Ask Umaru Dikko how that works because I cannot explain it despite quite a while spent watching and wondering on the fringes of the Nigerian scene.
Jerry could have told all this much, much better but we just have to get along without him.