War breaks out between Romanian and Hungarian airlines WizzAir?

The boss of Wizz Air, the Hungarian low-cost airline, has harshly criticized Romanian airlines. He said they existed as zombies in the airline market.

Zombies?

Like Napi.hu reported, József Váradi, the boss of low-cost airline Wizz Air, told the Cluj-Napoca news portal when he began to castigate Romania’s national airline Tarom and the country’s low-cost carrier, Blue Air. He said these two are practically zombies in the airline market.

The European Union has eased the terms of the subsidies due to the losses caused by the pandemic but, according to Váradi, Tarom and Blue Air can only avoid bankruptcy with government money.

EU aid

The Cluj-Napoca Chronicle reports that Romania’s national airline, Tarom, will receive 1.9 million euros in state aid. According to Transport Minister Sorin Grindeanu, the European Commission deemed the aid to be in line with EU rules and therefore approved it a few days ago. The sum of 1.9 million euros will be used by Tarom to cover damage caused by the pandemic between July 1 and December 31, 2020, iho.hu writing.

Reviews

“Two Romanian airlines, the public company Tarom and the low-cost company Blue Air, are on the verge of bankruptcy”,

Maszol cited József Váradi, CEO of Hungarian low-cost airline Wizz Air.

“We had significant losses in two years of the epidemic, but our solvency was not affected,”

Varadi added.

“At the moment, Wizz Air is the only Romanian airline to be up to date with its payments; we paid everyone, even during the epidemic, according to the contracts in force”,

the CEO told a news portal in Cluj Napoca.

“The other airlines don’t pay their suppliers because they are technically bankrupt, but they are kept alive thanks to government and state subsidies (…) I can talk about Tarom and Blue Air, these companies are in financial difficulty; they don’t pay, they are headed for failure, bankruptcy,”

he added.

Negative predictions

According Maszol, this is not the first time that József Váradi has made predictions about Tarom’s future. In 2018 he said “it’s only a matter of time before Tarom is gone”. Other Wizz Air executives have previously indicated that the company would be happy to take Tarom’s place in the Romanian market in the event of bankruptcy.

According Napi.hu, the boss of Wizz Air does not talk nonsense when he talks about the bankruptcy of Tarom. The company has been operating at a loss since 2008, and at the end of 2020 its debt exceeded RON 1 billion (HUF 76.6 billion, EUR 202 million).

Source: Napi.hu, iho.hu, maszol.ro