Another day, another bankrupt company.
El Gordo has been telling us that he’s the man to steer us through these difficult economic times which are nothing to do with his management of the economy for the last decade. He’s the man to guide us out of recession and make the People’s Republic of New Britain the place to be come the glorious socialist revolution once he’s delivered us from the hands of the evil capitalists clutches of the global economic downturn.
So how does he explain today’s collapse of the airline, XL? I must confess, I hadn’t even heard of XL until today but they’re actually the third biggest package holiday provider in the UK with 11 aircraft and about 1,700 staff. Did the airline take on Xcessive Liabilities? Was it a result of Xtra Lending? No, it was Xpensive Lubricants – XL said that its operating costs were rising by $80m per year as a result of rising fuel prices.
About 80,000 passengers that flew with XL are currently stranded and the Civil Aviation Authority now face the mammoth task of co-ordinating the return home of them all. 67,000 of the stranded passengers booked their flights directly with XL and will most likely have to pay at least part of the cost of getting home. The remaining 23,000 should be able to get home for free via other ABTA operators.
The Chief Executive of XL, Phil Wyatt, was gutted when he gave the press conference this morning, on the verge of tears throughout. Probably not as gutted as the people who have been left stranded abroad or the people whose holidays have been cancelled because XL’s planes have been grounded by the administrators but it was genuine emotion.
The economy safe in Gordo’s hands? Don’t make me laugh.
Technorati Tags: XL, Administration
Phil Wyatt sounds like an illiterate moron who makes multiple grammatical errors when he speaks. If you let such a person run an airline then you’re asking for trouble.
“Its going to be the most dramatic airlift that anyone has undertook”.
What a spiv!
Richard Branson is barely literate through severe dyslexia, it hasn’t stopped him becoming very rich and very successful. Ditto Alan Sugar.
I would have thought…
…the administrators would be happy to lease the XL planes to the rescue teams as it means they can earn some extra money? the planes are doing nowt, earning nowt, this is a way for the administrators to earn some of their pond of flesh?
It’s not as easy as that – they’d have to be insured and maintained and fuelled and it looks like they’re going to liquidate the group rather than sell it on as a going concern or try to get it trading again. They’ve sold off the French and German airlines in the group already as going concerns but they said the rest of the group wasn’t viable. They can’t risk increasing the liabilities of the group if they intend to liquidate it. The company bank accounts will be frozen now and if they had any accounts in credit they will be used to pay off debts either through the receiver or by a creditor exercising their right of set-off. In actual fact, the administrators will charge a small fortune and the creditors are unlikely to see very much of their money back but that’s always the way with insolvency.
No, i meant that they lease an old XL plane to say Tommy Cook for 2 days, to fly people home ans while they are at it, they could hire the ex XL staff too to fly it as they will not be up to much
Or to put it more simply, Wonko, if the CAA have to organise the repatriation WE pay, but if the administrators allowed the XL flights to fulfil their contracts and bring people who have already paid good money up front home, it would be a small carving off the pounds of flesh the capitalist vultures hope to gorge themselves on.
The administrators said they grounded the flights because the company couldn’t pay for fuel or insurance.
yes, the liquidatiors cant pay for the fuel or insurance but the rescue fund can and the liquidators can hire out their otherwise dormant planes to the rescue fund too, earning them some money
Both Branson and Sugar became rich because they profited from the labour of their employees – without them they wouldn’t be so rich.
Brown is a wanker, but you can’t blame him for the economy. He doesn’t control it – he’s allows the EU, the Bank of England, the US government, and big business to excercise control in the economy.
I’ll say it again. Brown was a socialist committed to the extension of democracy into the economy – but that was over two decades ago!
charlie
branson profitted from the labour of his employees because he told them what to do and it made wheel barrows full of money, some people are good at making money and some people are not. Some people have vision and the will to act upon it and some people dont. Our society encourages us to be mundane boring people who clock into work every morning but sometimes people reject this concept and sometimes they earn a lot of money
Oliver reed was dyslexic too
My point was that there’s no skill involved beyond being able to work out what goods and services are required and being able to employ people. The prisons are full of people who were able to buy and sell drugs, guns, sex, etc. and some were even employing other people to do it for them!
Many of the self-made millionaires we know of got rich as a result of government policies… Duncan Bannatyne got rich out of opening care homes at a time when councils were closing them. Brian Souter made a mint because of the Tory government’s policy of privatising public transport and the railways – somewhere that Branson also did well out of. What’s more, buses and railways are given a greater subsidy now than when we owned them, effectively guaranteeing profits for the private monopolies running them…
‘My point was that there’s no skill involved beyond being able to work out what goods and services are required and being able to employ people.’
Have you ever owned, managed or run your own company?
Have you ever been the man on the point where if you screw up, you and all your buddies are fucked and will be eating porridge for the next 6 months?
If management were so easy why is everything so fucked up in this country (Health service et al)
Most people dont have the balls or want the responsibility of running a company, it is too risky and hard work but some people thrive on the pressure.
Most people want to start work at 9, fanny about for a few hours and go home at 5 and have no responsibilities about their work. By the way that is fine, work is something that happens to mosty of us. Some of us fiocus on work, some of us focus on our model railways and some of us focus on our families. These guys, luckily for us, were work obsessed trolls, who worked tons of hours, paid lots of tax and kept a fair few of us in bean money.
If you go for central control by incompotent civil servants you end up with the moribund economic situation that destroyed the soviet union and almost destroyed britain the last time labour were in power.
life has 3 segments, you sleep for 8 hours, so you can stay awake for the other 16, you work for 8 hours so you can afford the other 16 and you play for 8 hours to give the other 16 a point.
“Have you ever been the man on the point where if you screw up, you and all your buddies are fucked and will be eating porridge for the next 6 months?”
When does this ever happen?
If you admire the tyrants of industry, fair enough. But I’d rather we had some democracy in the workplace…
Just a quick question I want to ask Charlie Marks: In germany a politician from the “left party”(which is getting stronger every year)suggested to dispossess rich families for example the schaeffler family(who’s firm produce engines,gearboxes etc.)because apperently they did not work for it but the workers earned the money and therefore should get it.He says the family is dispossessing the workers and should be forced by law to evenly distribute the money between the workers(it is about 10 billion euro between the mother and her son).
Would you agree with this statement?
charlie
it happened to me, i, had my own company, i fucked it up, we lost our jobs, our pay, our overtime we had been banking on and our lives were shit for a while.
Axel – when you mentioned porridge I thought you were talking about prison.
Jerry – which politician is this? I doubt very much the statement. Dispossess? Just to be clear, it’s not about the right to personal property but about the right to own productive property: Shaeffler’s business could become a worker cooperative.
charlie, sorry of course, i should have thought of a better description of being so poor you can only afford porridge or pasta.
Some MDs do end up in the big hoose but usually 3 star low sec places 😉
The statement is very much true and the politician is oskar lafontaine.He’s (lets be polite)feckin crazy.
I don’t think Lafonaine’s that crazy, granted that statement is a little odd – I don’t share his social democratic politics, of course, but Die Linke has become a remarkably successful party and he’s to be credited for his part in it.