The Jet Airways (Mumbai International) saga rolls on with reports that the imminent sale of assets, including 11 aircraft and spare engines, has been deferred for 90 days. This follows confirmation late last week that the yet-to-relaunch airline had posted a net loss of INR3.08 billion rupees (USD37.8 million) for the three months to September 30, and news earlier this week that Liechtenstein police had raided the home and frozen the assets of a top investor in the airline.
According to India's Economic Times, the Kalrock Capital-Murari Lal Jalan consortium attempting to complete the buyout of Jet Airways put out a call for bidders in August to acquire five B777-300ERs, three B737-800s, and three A330-200s, along with aircraft engine spares. According to the newspaper, around 12 potential buyers had expressed interest and conducted due diligence. The sale of the planes was approved in the resolution orders issued by the National Company Law Appellate Tribunal (NCLAT) in June 2021.
However, a Jet Airways monitoring committee meeting held on November 11 deferred the sale. The issue appears to be ongoing problems extracting cash from the consortium despite numerous promises and court orders to make good on certain payments. That includes a dispute over who is responsible for paying the INR2.75 billion (USD33.8 million) owed to Jet Airways' employee pension fund and a spat over which party will receive the funds from the proposed lease of three B777s to Air Serbia.
Meanwhile, the airline's latest financial report shows that it derived unaudited revenues of just INR135.2 million (USD1.66 million) in the three months to September 30, 2022. Unaudited expenses totalled INR3.22 billion (USD39.6 million) across the same period.
Pune-based accounting firm Sharp and Tannan Associates were engaged to review the latest unaudited accounts and aside from concluding that Jet Airways' continuing losses are eroding its net worth and that current liabilities exceeded current assets at the end of the last quarter, found that multiple assertions in the accounts, including "existence, completeness, valuations, cut-offs etc, with respect to the majority of the assets, liabilities, and certain income/expenses cannot be concluded due to the lack of sufficient appropriate evidence. In addition, we could not obtain sufficient and appropriate evidence for adequacy and reasonableness of management estimates for various provisions, fair valuation/net realizable value of various assets, etc."
