This alleged Council 'asset purchase' and 'lease back' sounds strange and I would be interested to know exactly what is being proposed.
Me too. It might be something along the lines of the councils owning the airport and then tendering the running and management of the terminal (or perhaps the entire airport) to a third party. Similar to the arrangement that Regional & City Airports Management (RCAM) have at airports such as Blackpool, City of Derry and Exeter (
Home - Regional & City Airports Management). There's a bit more background to the City of Derry situation here
MSA | Derry Airport
(I cite RCAM purely as an example of a possible relationship and I'm not suggesting that this is necessarily what the councils are going for nor that RCAM would necessarily be involved).
The Daily Record story (
Prestwick Airport set for £6m boost from from public purse - Daily Record ) refers to a meeting on Tuesday 27th August of South Ayrshire Council's leadership panel. That meeting's papers are here (
https://ww20.south-ayrshire.gov.uk/e...nda27Aug13.pdf ). There's nothing obvious relating to the above story, but the papers relating to it may well have been confidential. I note that there's an item relating to an application to the 'West of Scotland Loan Fund Ltd' and wondered if that might be the relevant paper (it seems to be confidential). The fund's website states that the maximum loan they advance is only £50,000, so perhaps it's not that (or the councils are using various sources to assemble the £2 million each quoted in the article).
Thanks for the update 'Sunsetrep' and I hope that the discussions reach a successful conclusion.