Just an update, purchase was approved by the lower house last week, now goes to the Senate. There is talk now that the airline should just be expropriated from the current owners. Aside from being a bad precedent(owners of other Argentine assets and real estate should take note) what is there to expropriate, debts? My understanding is that they only own 2 of the planes they operate.
The government admitted last week that they were providing 100 million dollars to keep the airline afloat for another 2 months. My guess is when fuel subsidies are included about 2 million a day is being spend. On an annualized basis this about $720 million dollars(my guess is a lot more will have to be spendt trying to turn this around). This works out to about 80 thousand dollars for each employee of the airline. I know the government wants to save all these jobs, but spending 80k per employee (whose pay is probably less than 20k per employee) doesn´t quite seem to be an efficient way of going about it.
Actually for the sums being spendt you could shut-down the airline continue to pay all 9000 employees, start another airline of similar capacity, and still have change from your $720 million.
Are these people really that dumb or is there a swindle of massive proportions going down?