Friday 18 December 2009

@ Adam Collyer

Adam Collyer left a comment here as follows:

OK. I'll try again. Why is your idea [that BA issues new shares to its pension funds to settle the pension fund deficit] better than BA doing a £4 billion rights issue to meet its pension deficit?

That is another option that is well worth considering, of course, if BA's shareholders are up for it, a variant of which I have recommended myself on more than one occasion. However that wasn't the point of the original post, the point was to highlight that BA and its pension funds, taken together, are in fact a worker-owned "investment trust with an expensive hobby of running an airline" (as Lola put it).

I always find it helpful to look at the 'big picture' before worrying about solutions (sometimes there simply aren't any, and it's best to let the trade and assets go into new ownership and start again).

3 comments:

James Higham said...

The last time I flew BA, they hovered for 40 minutes above Heathrow because they'd missed their gate, then they nearly clipped a fence on the way down on an outer runway.

Great airline.

Anonymous said...

Yes, you're definitely right about BA. The Americans say the same about General Motors. And I'm afraid quite a few big companies are in the same boat.

It would be interesting to know how much of a pension contributions holiday BA took while stock markets were booming though.

Mark Wadsworth said...

JH, The pedant in me wants to know if you reallt "hovered". In a jet plane?

AC, part of the Chrysler and General Motors deals was that the trade unions got large stakes in those companies is lieu of unpaid contributions. I assumed that people would know that when reading my post about BA.