Creditors of bankrupt Slovakia-based SkyEurope Airlines met for their first meeting in Bratislava on March 1 and of the total of 3,400 creditors, around 70 registered at the meeting, the TASR newswire wrote.
The total amount of acknowledged financial claims has reached €123 million, with unacknowledged claims totalling an additional €57 million. The property that remained when the low-cost airline went entered bankruptcy at the end of August 2009 has been calculated at only €5.7 million.
“The value of the property may not be realistic and may fall, as the company called E-Clear, on which SkyEurope had a claim, has declared bankruptcy,” SkyEurope bankruptcy trustee Ľubomír Bugan told TASR.
According to Juraj Bizoň from law office Bizoň & Partners, which is among the creditors, the trustee has to pay the airline’s former employees first and only then can he begin to satisfy creditors’ claims.
“Therefore the trustee feels paralysed. He can’t even terminate the lease, he can’t do anything, as whatever he ordered in these bankruptcy proceedings, he wouldn’t be able to pay for it,” said Bizoň. He described the creditor’s meeting as a simulated legal measure as there is a serious effort to cancel the bankruptcy proceedings. “It (the cancellation) was decided on and an appellate court is examining it. I think that it’s a sort of theatre without legal effects,” he said.
At the meeting, creditors backed Bugan as bankruptcy trustee and set up a five-member committee of creditors made up of Bratislava and Vienna airports, Slovakia's Tax Directorate, social insurer Sociálna Poistovňa and Flight Operational Services (LPS). TASR
Compiled by Zuzana Vilikovská from press reports
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