Guys, Qantas is not a loss maker if you can buy it cheap enough. This was my big lesson from the "recession we had to have" if you can buy a distressed business for cents in the dollar, renegotiate employment and other contracts as part or a bankruptcy or receivership, you can make a killing.
My own view is that Qantas is deliberately in a loss making situation as depicted by the accounts as the powers that be correctly know that there is no independent forensic aviation accounting capability in Australia. That means that Qantas can do what it likes with provisions and allocations and will of course no doubt be perfectly within the law.
Andrew Sisson has it right: buy it, turf out the Board and management and go through it with a new broom. His opponents of course want to do the same thing, preferably in private.
Make no mistake 65% of the Australian domestic market plus the infrastructure is very valuable. I fail to understand how the current Qantas strategy is going to do anything to maximise shareholder value in the long term, and their litany of failures makes me wonder if this is deliberate although I am sure it is all perfectly legal...or I was until the resignation of the company secretary and his assistant.
Translation: Could I be forgiven for wondering if something stinks at Qantas and it has been that way since at least a few years before the APA bid?