War breaking out between Romanian airlines and Hungarian WizzAir?

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

Zombies?

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

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

Aid by the EU

The Cluj-Napoca Chronicle reports that the Romanian national airline, Tarom, will receive €1.9 million in state aid. According to Transport Minister Sorin Grindeanu, the European Commission considered the aid to be in line with EU rules and thus approved it a few days ago. The sum of €1.9 million will be used by Tarom to cover damages caused by the pandemic between 1 July and 31 December 2020, iho.hu writes.

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Critics

“Two Romanian airlines, state-owned Tarom and low-cost airline Blue Air, are on the verge of bankruptcy,”

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

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

added Váradi.

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

the CEO told a news portal in Cluj Napoca.

“The other airlines are not paying their suppliers because they are technically bankrupt, but they are being kept alive with government and state subsidies (…) I can talk about Tarom and Blue Air, these companies are in financial trouble; they are not paying, they are heading towards failure, bankruptcy,”

he added.

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Negative predictions

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

According to Napi.hu, the head of Wizz Air is not talking 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).