• Says N85b trapped funds repatriated

Minister of Aviation and Aerospace Development, Festus Keyamo, has again expressed optimism that Emirates Airline will resume operation in June.

The minister, while speaking on a television show monitored by The Guardian, confirmed that all issues leading to Emirates Airline suspension of operations in Nigeria had been resolved and that the airline was prepared to resume operations in Nigeria.

The airline, on October 2022, suspended flight services from Nigeria due to its inability to repatriate trapped funds of about N85 billion.

The minister said: “I just received a letter from Emirates thanking us for going through all the gamut and that they are ready to come back.

“They will announce the date. It may be before June. It will be definitely before the summer.”

He maintained that the previous announcement about the resumption of the airline last year was not fake but was announced prematurely as there were still ongoing talks between the two governments.

The minister noted that President Bola Tinubu played a significant role in resolving the frosty relations between the two countries.
He said: “It was not fake news; it was a hasty news. It is almost happening.”

Speaking further on the repatriation of trapped funds, which led to the suspension of some foreign airlines’ operations in Nigeria, Keyamo clarified that all trapped funds of airlines under the purview of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) had been cleared.

He further stated that the remaining trapped funds of airlines in Nigeria were held in commercial banks in the country.

According to him, these commercial banks lack the capacity to obtain the necessary foreign exchange and transfer the funds to the airlines.

The minister further revealed that the Federal Government was working on a practice direction that would enable domestic airlines to dry lease aircraft.

He said because some local operators had, in the past, breached the Cape Town Convention, which regulates aircraft leasing across the world, the Aviation Working Group, co-chaired by Airbus and Boeing, had blacklisted Nigeria until it implemented a law that would guide aircraft leasing.

He said: “Why we cannot compete with big international airlines is because we don’t have access to aircraft on the same terms as they have. People don’t know that the best airlines in the world run their fleet 100 per cent based on actual purchase of aircraft. Recent studies show that 70 per cent of the fleet across the world is on dry leases.

“For airlines that have bank facilities, they have access to loans in single digits, but our banks do 26 per cent. It was as a result of this that I called industry people to inform them that in order to survive, they must have access to these aircraft as those around the world.

“We are in the process of drafting a practice direction to satisfy the Aviation Working Group that once we give a practice direction that says: ‘please, our judges, don’t grant injunctions to detain aircraft that are on dry lease in Nigeria because it gives us a bad image and it is against the Cape Town Convention of the Aviation Working Group’’.