No legal basis for saving the airline
The Montenegrin airline Montenegro Airlines (MA) goes bankrupt. As the Montenegrin Minister for Capital Investment Mladen Bojanic said at a press conference on Thursday, there is no legal basis to save the state airline. The minister specified that the MA flights would soon be suspended, without giving an exact date.
At first, Bojanic was unable to comment on the airline's total debt. The state will have to spend around 50 million euros on the contributions for the employees that have not been paid since 2016 alone.
It was only at the end of November that the media reported that the MA was in urgent need of state aid of 155 million euros. However, it was about the rescue plans of the government of Dusko Markovic. At the beginning of December, the Adriatic state received a new government, the first since 1991, in which President Milo Djukanovic's Democratic Party of Socialists is not involved.
Montenegro Airlines, founded in 1994, currently owns four aircraft, three Embraer 195s and one Fokker 100. In the first nine months of 2020, the company's revenue fell by 80 percent as a result of the coronavirus crisis.
