AirAsia Group reacts to “intimidatory” airport lawsuit

AirAsia X (D7, Kuala Lumpur Int’l) has altered its planned debt restructuring scheme, reclassifying Malaysia Airports Holdings as a secured creditor and re-categorising its 1,200 unsecured creditors into two separate classes, AirAsia Group said in a statement on November 4. At the end of October, the airport operator initiated a lawsuit against the group’s long-haul wing demanding payment of an allegedly owed sum of MYR78.16 million (USD18.77 million) and insisted it be excluded from the proposed debt restructuring. AirAsia X had proposed to creditors on October 7 to restructure MYR63.5 billion (USD15.2 billion) in liabilities. Malaysia Airports is a secured creditor of AirAsia X and must be excluded from the airline’s debt reshuffle, the airport operator argued. AirAsia Group said in its statement that while it had decided to accommodate Malaysia Airports and had revised the scheme under two separate classes, “A” and “B”, it stressed: “In addition to being frivolous and vexatious, [Malaysia Airports’] move is intimidatory in nature and at odds with its stated intentions of finding an amicable solution moving forward.” Class A, it clarified, consists of creditors considered to be “critical or essential” and who may have secured other rights, while class B includes all other creditors. Malaysia Airports Holdings is now an A creditor, it said. As for the immediate demand for payment of the sum expressed in the lawsuit, comprising “largely of passenger service charges that were never collected from passengers, AirAsia X wishes to reiterate that it will not meet this demand,” the statement said. It described the legal action as “opportunistic” and “appears to be an attempt to gain preferential treatment and an unfair and unlawful advantage over all other creditors.” In related news, Indonesia’s stock exchange (Bursa Efek Indonesia – BEI) has threatened to delist Indonesia AirAsia (QZ, Jakarta Soekarno-Hatta), which carries the ticker symbol CMPP, from its trading board, local media reported on November 5.