The sale of BD to IAG is on track to be completed in just over a week. Under the terms of the deal LH must sell WW by the start of May. If they fail to do so then they are required to pay compensation to IAG to cover the cost of disposing of WW.

According to the following article IAG have already a drawn up a plan of what to do with WW should LH fail to sell it.

What future for Bmi Regional and Bmibaby? | ABTN

I am guessing that the IAG plan to do one of three things:

1. They have a buyer lined up already

2. Pay another carrier to take WW of there hands as they did with BACON to BE

3. Close the airline down and dispose of it's assets

Which outcome do you consider most likely?

Latest from Tiny Town
 

How long will the goodwill last without any concrete information?

Whew
 

Whew - BALPA is on the job and is going to save us!
I feel safer already. I could be a very grateful little penguin if all goes well.:rolleyes:

yes i can sleep sound at night now as well, i feel supremely confident that BALPA ,will save the baby and regional guys.
I'm really glad i paid them all that money.
Does anyone know what the redundancy terms are??

I really hope everyone at BMIBaby is okay and that they are bought out while minimising job losses. A little suprised to see the lashing out at BALPA. Hopefully Baby employees (Inkjet?) were giving feedback when the current 'crazy gang' managment were 'leading' with their 'dump loyal MAN customers/expand at MAN/retranch to BHX/go to the Canaries/consolidate at East Midlands strategy':ugh:. Oh Dear Oh Dear Oh Dear.....

Lashing out??? lets see who gets hung out to dry!! then the "lashing" will really start. If anyone out there, is waiting for BALPA to save them, then they are sadly deluding themselves!!! Fact..:mad:
I was once proud to wear the uniform and be a part of what was a great airline. Shame on them!!!!!
Baby has been raped and pillaged by mainline constraints , no investment, and bad management decisions for years, and now we are going to pay the price.
I dont blame our current management for this mess, they have been shackled from above to a basket case at LHR for years .

Is it possible that the potential buyer is waiting for the sale to IAG to complete, in the hope of getting a better price than they would have got from Lufthansa?

I may be missing something here, but when Lufty agreed to sell bmi and baby for less than bmi alone, surely they shot themselves in the foot.

Nobody in their right minds would want to pay good money for baby if they could avoid it. Anyone interested in acquiring baby for nothing would surely wait for the almost inevitable acquisition by IAG and take it off WW's hands. Even with such a deal, both parties win. Lufty pays for it.

WW has stated, before completion of the bmi purchase, that he already has plans in place to dispose of baby. Could it be that baby employees fearful of IAG acquisition are, in reality, lined up for a pleasant surprise? For a while, unless losses are resolved, at least.

Business Air ditto, perhaps? Can't see why not.

Or am I being overly optimistic or just plain dim? :confused:

Erwin

I reckon you're right on the money mate. Lufty seem to have put the baby sale on the backburner to hurry through the bmi sale, but this will ultimately cost them more...but at least they'll have ditched the £4m a day loss maker (is it per day?)

Er....£4 million per day! Somebody didn't do well in maths at school did they?

I presume, with BA having said they are closing the EMA hangar by the end of the year (AFAIK baby light maintenance was subcontracted to bmi at EMA) then any new owner of baby will have to provide a new maintenance provider and maybe even another hangar at EMA or will need to ferry /rotate EMA based a/c for light maintenance (presume heavy could stay with current providers in eastern Europe)

Runway...

You can poke fun, you can laugh, but the £4m a day figure is one that has come for the mouths of quite a few senior figures. £200m was the last financial years losses, not this years.

Sounds even more like Erwin has it right

Lufthansa Struggles to Dump BMIbaby to Complete IAG Deal - Bloomberg

Interesting point about the article...the only other place I have heard of one of the bidders being called ACL (rather than ASL) is on this thread and it is the same post that states they lost interest. The article doesn't name the 'close source'...

This may be my experience of newspapers making up sports stories by using internet forums, but...

Maybe they were thinking Air Contractors Ltd instead of the parent company ASL.

Not in this case.

Story I am hearing is that FlyFor Beans were preffered bidders until they actually looked at and finally understood the financial picture and despite getting Welsh Assembly funding quickly pulled out of the process. Lufthansa then went grovelling back to ASL to ask if they were still interested. The silence was deafening in reply.

Intro made an offer but by then FFB had started to offer jobs to the current management team in Tiny Town and so Intro and at least one other group had been told quite firmly that no other offers were to be accepted. Stobart had looked at the books and immediately withdrew.

Regional had one other group that made an offer and Lufthansa were only interested in Granite, for whatever reason, even when one of the investors in Granite was rumoured to be someone who has made headlines in Scotland for all the wrong reasons.

Whatever happens now, it looks like Lufthansa have spectacularly messed up the sales of Baby and Regional. It will cost them millions and in the worst case scenario hundereds of people their jobs. Wolfgang has done a top job :{

so the granite deal is now totally finished and dead?

Not what I understand. I believe that negotiations are underway between Granite and IAG.

Yup I heard that Granite made a revised offer and lufti said no. Now they have gone direct to IAG with the same deal. I would think news will follow shortly after this Friday. Good luck guys

If IAG can stomach the offer I would have thought a good PR coup for them? Saving jobs etc where Lufty couldn't etc they're hardly gonna have any worries about competition from them??

Meanwhile
 

• Please note: Our service from Edinburgh to Leeds Bradford will be suspended on 27 April 2012.

To think they used to fill a F100 on this route

Flybe step in (LoganAir) to pick up LBA GLA route, sort of back to the future with a S340

Funny world:confused:

Staff buy out not an option then? Seems like the initial price would be cheap...but like Big Airways buying Concorde:)

I thought the £4m loss figure was per week. If it was per day that would clock up to £170m in a mere 6 weeks. Evenif the figure is weekly it's still a hefty £210m per year - more than enough for Lufthansa to want to be rid of the troublesome child.

The £4m loss was in reference to the BMI Group, not Baby. Not sure whether it was per day or per week. Depending on who is talking, the baby loss is anywhere between £10m-£25m pa.

Random
 

OK but this is the babe thread?:sad:

Annual losses + large liabilities = very big number.

At this late stage unless someone pops out of the woodwork, it doesn't look very good right now.... :*

I would like to hope that potential buyers are just hanging on waiting for improved terms. I'm sure IAG would rather dispose of it as a going concern than wind an already loss making business down at I'm sure much greater cost.

Intro made an offer but by then FFB had started to offer jobs to the current management team in Tiny Town and so Intro and at least one other group had been told quite firmly that no other offers were to be accepted. Stobart had looked at the books and immediately withdrew.

Stobarts looked at this?? where would they get the money from?:confused:

Where would FFB get the money from? Last accounts £12840 in net assets.

Once again, stacks of uninformed comment, hearsay, and products of a night on the beers being masqueraded as facts. Just read Granite City's post - what a load of self contradictory tosh, repeated as gospel by Rowly.

No-one outside of the core bid teams will know what is going on. No-one. Certainly not those people on here who are 'bigging themselves up' pretending to be on the inside of deals from which they are clearly excluded.

Can't people have a little respect for the people in bmibaby (and Regional), who are living with the Sword of Damocles over them? They must be going through a pretty rotten time right now, who the hell gave some of you the right to make that worse with your crazy rumours?

Shame on you.

TA

Well said, Twin Aisle !

So tell us Twin Aisle, did FFB make a bid or not?

I am just repeating what I am hearing in the crew rooms and what collegues in Donington Hall/Hastings House have been saying.

This is a RUMOUR network.

Pot to Kettle, come in. Over.:ugh:

You'll notice I have not started any rumours.

I respect the staff in bmi, baby and Regional.

I commend you to do the same, I intend to carry on so doing.

Out.

Well, thank you for your respect.

Your pomposity is a little unwelcome though.

If you are part of the bmi landscape you will be aware of the dearth of information from management levels down. Into the vaccum comes rumour and speculation. The name on this particular website contains the word rumour. If yopu don't like it you can log off and read the accounts of bmiBaby for factual information.

We have been treated like mushrooms and it is our livelihoods that are on the line so you can shove your patronising attitude where the sun doesn't shine.:ugh:

Come on TA, you won't be starting any rumours, you can give us the facts. Did you offer your £12840 for baby? Why aren't you saving all the jobs at baby instead of complaining about posts on pprune?

One interested party is posting on PPRuNe which seems both an interesting way to negotiate and an interesting way to treat a confidentiality clause!

What a mess.

Inkjet,

In ABZ we have been living with the will they/wont they situation of being bought since November last year. Information has been scant and if management had been a bit more proactive in keeping us informed - even if it had been in the form of "There is no news" it would have kept us a little more in the loop. It seems that even our management team has been living on a diet of second hand gossip and speculation as they have been mushroomed as well.

If I repeat on a RUMOUR network the RUMOURS I have heard from colleagues and friends in other parts of the Group, and am then patronised by someone who is directly involved in negotiations, then it does not give me the feeling that things are going well. Certainly not in the baby part of the group. I am not covered by any disclosure agreements and see no reason why I shouldnt share the information I am hearing. If it is wrong, fine let us know what is wrong and it can be filtered out of Galley FM. You as management Inkjet would you be able to assist in filtering the incorrect info out without breaking any confidences? It certainly would help.
If that is all we have after 6 months of waiting, then it is a pretty bad show for the management team in DH

I have a mortgage, wife and kids to provide for, it is a pretty bleak affair if I have to rely on a rumour network for information. I certainly would not base any life changing decisions on pprune, but it is at least one small cog in the information machine outside of the bmi group "empty space".

I'm afraid it is a mess and a horrible time for all employees. Whether you are Mainline, Regional or baby it matters not.

There's no point in fighting amongst ourselves, we're all in the same boat and much of the management team has the same information as has been produced here.

It's not the bmi Baby or Regional management teams fault that there is no information to give out. Simply because there isn't anything really.

I know more than most and really I know stuff all fact. I hear huge numbers of rumours and things that make sense, but very little of it could be construed as fact.

However, I suspect the reason that so little information is coming out is down to the simple thing my mother said to me as a child "If you can't say anything nice, then don't say anything at all."
I'm afraid that the dearth of information tells it's own story.