France’s La Compagnie secures state, shareholder financing

La Compagnie (B0, Paris Orly) has announced it has secured an additional EUR10 million euro (US12.1 million) in state-backed loans, in addition to an undisclosed “significant” capital injection from its shareholders. “Obtaining this second state-guaranteed loan is evidence that La Compagnie is recovering. We never stopped reinventing ourselves during this past year in order to face the crisis and we have even found new angles and short-term opportunities to guarantee La Compagnie’s longevity. We are now in the home stretch of our recovery preparations,” said Chairman Christian Vernet. The all-business-class specialist said that it hoped to restart services from Paris Orly to New York Newark in June 2021, and from Nice in July 2021, although a final timeline will depend on further regulatory decisions regarding border restrictions. Italian aviation media reported earlier that the carrier was also mulling services from Milan Malpensa to New York. However, La Compagnie has since told ch-aviation that it had not taken any decisions in that regard yet. La Compagnie has been dormant in terms of its scheduled flights since March 2020, when a transatlantic travel ban forced it to suspend all scheduled flights. As its core business remains frozen due to regulations, La Compagnie has turned to ad hoc charter flights in Europe and beyond using both of its A321-200NX(LR)s. The current state-backed loan is the second time the French government has assisted La Compagnie. The airline received its first such financing, also for EUR10 million, in June 2020. At that time, it hoped the added liquidity would be sufficient to keep it going until a planned restart of scheduled flights in the third quarter of 2020. The ensuing waves of COVID infections in Europe and the US, however, eventually rendered the plan moot.