SAS is fined by the stock exchanges in Stockholm and Copenhagen – Oslo Børs will not fine the airline
SAS announces in two separate announcements on Friday morning and in the morning that the stock exchanges in Stockholm and Copenhagen have imposed fines on the airline for the handling of information in connection with this summer’s pilot strike.
The fine in Sweden is approximately 1.96 million Swedish kroner, or around 1.8 million Norwegian kroner at today’s exchange rate, according to a press release from Nasdaq Stockholm. This corresponds to three times the airline’s annual fee to the stock exchange in Stockholm.
In Denmark, the fine is set at the equivalent of one year’s annual fee to the Copenhagen stock exchange, it is stated.
DN has been in contact with Øivind Amundsen, director of Oslo Børs, who says they have registered the fines from Stockholm and Copenhagen.
– We have not issued any fines, and we do not disclose what assessments we have made.
– So you won’t give a fine?
– We probably don’t want that. This is handled by Nasdaq.
“Very unfortunate”
“SAS publishes a stock market announcement about the strike as early as it was possible, but for technical reasons the announcement was published a few minutes after the news of the strike had reached the press as expected outside where the negotiations took place”, it says in the announcements.
That the news reached the media a few minutes before the stock market announcement was sent out was described as “very unfortunate”.
As you know, there was a big press conference outside the SAS head office in Stockholm at the beginning of July, when the strike first started. The airline writes in Friday’s announcement that it has taken action to “strengthen the procedures so that inside information does not reach the media before the company has sent out a message to the market”.
The summer of crisis
SAS has been through what can easily be described as a nightmarish summer.
I started in July, several hundred pilots went on strike, a strike that lasted for weeks. The outcome must be an agreement between the pilot unions and the airline on, among other things, a new collective agreement of five and a half years and the re-employment of several hundred pilots. The strike led to 3,700 canceled flights and several hundred thousand affected passengers.
The strike put a heavy dent in the airline’s summer traffic, but could have even greater consequences. Last month, DN wrote that SAS was close to implementing a dramatic “plan B” on the last day of the strike, Monday 18 July.
The management claimed the plan would become a reality if the pilots and SAS were not the only ones to have a new collective agreement. At this time, the board had approved a plan to send a notice of termination to approximately 4,200 out of a total of 8,000 SAS employees. Around half of the planes could have been parked for good.
The SAS chief was reticent with information about the assessments that were made in advance.
– At the time, we lost 130 million Swedish kroner daily, and it just continued. We were heading into the third week of the strike. Our position was really structurally, market-wise, slots (take-off and landing rights at the airports, editor’s note), branded goods, cash holdings… All this was under enormous pressure, said van der Werff.
The bankruptcy process
While many airlines used the corona pandemic to cut billions in debt and costs, SAS let the entire settlement wait.
On the way out of the pandemic, SAS boss Anko van der Werff found no other way out than to seek bankruptcy protection in the US, a so-called Chapter 11 process. The request was sent immediately after the heated pilot conflict in July turned into a strike.
Earlier in September, DN referred to court documents from the United States where it emerged that SAS may have to get rid of some of the most expensive long-haul aircraft in order to cut billions in debt.
SAS has long recognized that the Chapter 11 process in the American legal system is unusually expensive in a European context. It will also not be easier to deal with large leasing players and financial houses about large debt reductions when the passengers and airlines are now fully back in the air.
Exactly how much SAS must pay for the bankruptcy proceedings in New York is unknown, but van der Werff has expressed the wish that the court proceedings be completed in between nine and 12 months.
The process is as difficult as another financial rescue operation that took place at the exact same court in New York during the pandemic. At that time, the airline Aeroméxico was taken through bankruptcy proceedings, and the costs incurred were a total of 4.9 billion Mexican pesos – the equivalent of 2.5 billion kroner – in 2020 and 2021.
In mid-August, SAS secured a vital bridging loan of DKK 6.7 billion from the American buyout fund Apollo Global Management, with sky-high rent.(Terms)Copyright Dagens Næringsliv AS and/or our suppliers. We like to share our stuff using links that lead directly to our pages. Copying or other forms of use of all or part of the content can only be done with written permission or as permitted by law. For further terms see here.