A 99 percent slump in the passenger business, tens of thousands of employees on short-time work, a loss of one million euros every hour. The corona pandemic plunged Lufthansa into the greatest crisis in its history. CEO Spohr is fighting on many fronts.
Berlin / Frankfurt (dpa) - Lufthansa faces the truth a week ago. A decision about billions in government aid - and its conditions - is coming closer, the Dax group has been negotiating with the federal government for a long time because of the far-reaching consequences of the corona pandemic.
"These days, the future of Lufthansa will be decided," said CEO Carsten Spohr, according to the previously published speech at the Annual General Meeting on Tuesday (May 5).
However, Spohr had recently rejected a greater influence by the state on the company - and will also do so at the shareholders' meeting, which should only be broadcast on the Internet due to the corona crisis. "We got into this crisis through no fault of our own. Now we need state support. But we don't need state management," he says in the manuscript.
Spohr receives rifle support from politics. "The aid from the state is intended to help overcome the crises quickly," said the Secretary General of the CDU Economic Council, Wolfgang Steiger, of the German Press Agency. Direct state participation would "only be an absolute exception". Steiger emphasized: "From the start, the state has to make it clear that it only entered into the respective company investments due to the crisis and will exit again in the foreseeable future."
Steiger warned that politics should not secure a lasting influence on companies. "If parts of the federal government now want to use this request to secure significant state influence on this company, it is a strange behavior from politics," said the head of the CDU-affiliated association.
The UFO flight attendants' union also supported the board. Ufo managing director Nicoley Baublies, once a member of the supervisory board himself and often a keen critic of Spohr, said to "Welt am Sonntag": "In operational business, state representatives on the supervisory board offer no added value." The dpa told Baublies that such posts could quickly become symbolic. "Supervisory boards from the government do not replace guidelines on protection against dismissal, participation and other important points of our position paper on state participation."
The group's dilemma is huge: Of around 760 aircraft, around 700 are on the ground, 3,000 flights a day are canceled, more than 80,000 of the 130,000 employees are on short-time work, instead of 350,000 passengers a day, only around 3,000 fly with Lufthansa and its subsidiaries . Lufthansa currently has more than four billion euros in liquidity. But every hour, operationally, it loses one million euros due to the stoppage.
Government officials said the talks were ongoing. "We speak intensively with the Federal Government and KfW about liquidity support for our company," said Spohr. But the federal government is not the only point of contact. Because of the subsidiaries Austrian Airlines (AUA), Brussels Airlines, Swiss and Edelweiß, Spohr also has to talk to the government of Austria, Belgium and Switzerland.
While Berne has already pledged a multi-billion dollar loan, negotiations with Vienna are ongoing. Austria's Finance Minister Gernot Blümel was satisfied with the recent talks, in which Chancellor Sebastian Kurz also took part. However, it requires assurances and guarantees for the AUA hub in Vienna.
The Belgian government is not only demanding solid guarantees for the subsidiary Brussels Airlines in return for 290 million euros as liquidity aid, the newspapers "L'Echo" and "De Tijd" reported on Saturday. In a letter to Spohr, Prime Minister Sophie Wilmès also urged detailed growth prospects and quantifiable goals for the development of Brussels Airport as a hub. The issue of the Belgian state's participation with a possible veto right on corporate policy, for example on travel destinations, is also under discussion, the newspapers continue.
In Germany, the left-wing faction in the Bundestag and environmentalists are calling for government aid to be linked to demands. "Tax billions for Lufthansa can only be given against commitments to protect the climate," said Greenpeace traffic expert Benjamin Stephan on Sunday. "If the federal government now joins Lufthansa, it must insist on having a say and thus stop domestic flights and enforce a blending quota for alternative fuels."
The left-wing budget politician Victor Perli warned that an agreement with the federal government must include the preservation of jobs and climate targets. "Restructuring the group on the back of the employees is unacceptable. In return for government aid, Lufthansa has to live up to its overall social responsibility," said Perli.
