Jet Airways has landed in yet another big trouble as its lenders decide to initiate bankruptcy proceedings against the grounded airline. The crisis-hit airline shares have lost over half of the value.
Its stocks hit an intra-day low of Rs 32.25 per share, falling by a massive 52 per cent. At 1.41 p.m, Jet’s stocks were trading at Rs 38.05 per share, down Rs 30.25 or 44.29 per cent.
SBI-led lenders consortium on Monday said that they have decided to “seek resolution under IBC since only a conditional bid was received and requirement of the investor for SEBI exemptions and resolution of all creditors is possible under IBC”.
In 12 trading days, the scrip has fallen over 61 per cent.
After a meeting of the 26 lenders on Monday, SBI in a statement said, “after due deliberations, the lenders have decided to seek resolution for Jet Airways under the bankruptcy code since only a conditional bid was received”.
Jet Airways owes Rs 8,500 crore to public sector banks. In totality, it has a liability of about Rs 25,000 crore including dues of operational creditors.
The airline had stopped all its operations on April 17 and after two exact months, the decision of the lenders came to seek bankruptcy process through the National Company Law Tribunal.
After Jet Airways stopped its operations, the government re-allocated its slots and foreign traffic rights to rival carriers.
It should be brought into notice that multiple cancellations of domestic and international flights were done post the airline grounding its fleet and stopping its operations. This had affected the passengers badly. At that point of time, EaseMyTrip.com had come up with attractive offers only for the Jet Airways passengers, who had booked through this online travel aggregator but somehow their flights were cancelled by the crisis-hit airline.
Under this, the passengers were to get a discount voucher of Rs 750 and Rs 2000 on all domestic and international flights respectively.
As far as the airline staff is concerned, the staff members had to face severe financial crunch and they had written to President Ram Nath Kovind and PM Narendra Modi to intervene, so that their outstanding salaries got cleared and also the process of emergency funding be expedited.
On the one hand, senior Congress leader Anand Sharma had said that the grounding of Jet Airways appeared to be a scam whereas on the other hand, it was on April 22 that a major bank employees’ union All India Bank Employees’ Association (AIBEA) had said that the banks could lend some money to Jet Airways specifically for the purpose of paying employee salaries.
Not only this, shares of grounded Jet Airways advanced over 5 per cent too, a day after the diversified Hinduja Group said it is evaluating the opportunity to invest in the airline.
The airline staff had also approached the aviation ministry.