Air India board may not discuss appointments today

The Air India Board is unlikely to discuss recent high-profile appointments at its meeting tomorrow, as three of the five independent directors are not attending.

The three directors are Anand Mahindra, vice-chairman and managing director of Mahindra & Mahindra, Kolkata-based Industrialist Harsh Neotia, and Air Chief Marshal (retd) Fali H Major. The other two are Amit Mitra, Secretary General of Federations of Indian Chambers of Commerce & Industry, and Emke Group Managing Director M A Yusuffali.

“As three of the five independent directors on our board are not coming for the meeting tomorrow, it is very unlikely that the board will discuss any issue related to the controversy over recent appointments,” said a senior Air India official, who did not want to be identified.

Air India recently appointed Pawan Arora as chief operating officer for Air India Express, Stefan Sukumar as chief traning officer and Kamaljit Rattan as chief information officer. While Arora and Sukumar took charge a month ago, Rattan joined this week. But the airline said these appointments were ratified by the board and no particular person had any say in that.

According to him, the independent directors are not attending the meeting, as there has been lot of media hype over these appointments and they do not want it to grow further.

The official said the agenda was to accept the annual report for 2009-10 and discuss the financial results of the first half of this financial year.

National Aviation Company of India, which runs Air India, made operational losses of over Rs900 crore

in the first half of this financial year. During the same period, it also turned its domestic operations profitable by posting an operational profit of Rs87 crore. In the year-ago period, it had reported losses of Rs2,800 crore.

Air India posted operating loss of Rs5,000 crore and Rs3,300 crore in 2008-09 and 2009-10, respectively.

The state-run carrier has accumulated losses of Rs14,000 crore over the last four financial years and has a total debt of Rs48,000 crore, including Rs3,000 crore in long-term debt to acquire aircraft.