A picture of Aristotle Onassis’s smiling face still hangs on a wall of the president’s office at Olympic Airlines.
Days before the Greek state’s latest attempt to privatise the ailing enterprise, employees are not shy about saying what they need most is some of his Midas touch. After all, they admit, Olympic is far from resembling the golden goose the tycoon envisaged when he created the carrier for ”cosmopolitan jetsetters” in 1957.
”There’s been a lot of turbulence at the company,” says Melina Pitta, who heads public relations at the beleaguered airline. ”Morale is a problem; people have seen so many cuts and changes. But nobody wants Olympic to close down. That would be the end of an era.”
Five potential buyers, including the German budget airline DBA, are expected to place final, non-binding bids for Olympic on Wednesday.
It will be the fifth time since 1999 that Greece has tried to sell the loss-maker.
Each time, say officials, mismanagement, powerful unions and fears of the ”political cost” that may be involved have got the better of the deal. But this time is different.
Nationalised in 1975, Olympic is now the last airline in the pre-enlarged European Union to remain wholly state-owned. Efforts to rescue the organisation through restructuring, with the airline splitting its flight activities from ground and technical services in 2003, have not had the desired effect.
Under unprecedented pressure from the European commission to put the country’s woefully deficit-driven economy in order, Athens’ ruling conservatives insist there can be no second chance.
If a buyer cannot be found to help pay off the debts accrued by Olympic Airways, its predecessor, officials say openly they will have no choice but to auction the carrier’s assets. Like Sabena and Swissair before it, the once fabled organisation will be consigned to history.
”This is Olympic’s very last opportunity to survive,” said the Greek Transport Minister, Michalis Liapis,
Closure would spell doom for the tourist industry, Greece’s biggest foreign currency earner. The British, who top the league table of arrivals, would almost certainly feel the impact first. Because of growing demand, the airline recently boosted its Athens-London schedule with additional flights to Gatwick.
Olympic also has near-exclusive control over routes to the islands, including popular outposts in the Aegean.
”If it collapses, tourism will suffer terribly,” said one well-placed Olympic executive. ”There’d be chaos making connections to the islands. It would be a disaster for Greece. Olympic had six million passengers last year — that’s half the number of tourists who visited the country.”
Shutting the airline down could, say transport experts, have an even worse effect on the nation’s psyche. Although a far cry from the company that Pierre Cardin and other major fashion designers once rushed to work for, few firms remain as identified in the Greek public’s mind with past glories. Shortly after creating the airline from the ruins of TAE, a local civil aviation firm, Onassis ordered that gold-plated cutlery and crystal glasses become an integral part of first-class service.
When the company’s first Boeing 707 jets arrived in Athens, he kitted them out with pianos so famous players could entertain fellow magnates. The shipping tycoon’s determination to conquer the skies was such that he also offered free flights every Sunday — a ruse that gave Greeks their first taste of air travel and soon saw business surge.
Once taken over by the state, Olympic became equally well known for its employee largesse — with staff flying as far as Australia free of charge.
Caralampo Focas, a transport expert, said: ”The perceived wisdom is that people in Greece would be very upset if it closed down. As the flag carrier bearing the Olympic symbol, the airline evokes a deep sense of national pride — even if Greeks know that other, smaller countries have also lost their [state-owned] airlines.”
Ultimately, the carrier’s future will depend as much on the stance of the European commission as the success of negotiations this week. The airline is still under threat of being made to return around $245-million of state aid deemed by the commission to have broken competition rules.
Whether investors want to assume the risk of returning the subsidies remains to be seen. If not, say analysts, any of the airline’s creditors could deliver the coup de grace — a move that would make Onassis turn in his grave. – Guardian Unlimited Â