Blue Air prolongs pre-insolvency procedure, replaces CEO and seeks financing

Romanian low-cost airline Blue Air will remain for another year, until June 2023, under the preventive composition procedure - a pre-insolvency state agreed with the creditors two years ago that allows parties to implement a restructuring plan.

The air operator says that, at the end of June, the Bucharest Tribunal approved the 12-month extension of the preventive composition procedure opened by the company in Romania in June 2020.

Separately, Cristian Rada, the main shareholder of Blue Air, took over the CEO mandate of the company.

Blue Air announced in February this year the appointment of Steven Greenway as CEO on March 1. He replaced Oana Petrescu, who had joined the company in January 2018 and had held this position since 2019. Petrescu remained in the company in the role of Chairman of the Board of Directors.

Contacted by Economica.net, Oana Petrescu stated that Steven Greenway is no longer in the company. He left Blue Air for personal reasons.

Blue Air's restructuring and recovery plan, reconfirmed by the creditors, has two main directions - resizing and reorganizing the business around the bases and destinations that the company can profitably serve in the current conditions of flight demand and fuel price (including the completion of the outsourcing of non-core activities), and the resumption of the process of attracting external funding, in order to make it possible to return as quickly as possible, in a maximum of 2-3 years, to pre-pandemic activity levels.

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