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Aviation News September 2006
Aeroflot gets $3 bln for Boeing deal
By
Anton Doroshev and Gleb Bryanski
MOSCOW,
Sept 19 (Reuters) - A major shareholder of Aeroflot said on Tuesday he had stepped in to buy 22 long-range airliners
from U.S. Boeing Co on behalf of the Russian flag carrier, averting the collapse of
a $3 billion order. The
board of state-controlled Aeroflot, lacking political backing,
failed last Friday to decide between Boeing's pitch for its B787
Dreamliner and a rival offer from European planemaker Airbus of its A350 XWB.
Alexander
Lebedev, a member of parliament and tycoon who through his
National Reserve Corporation (NRC) owns 30 percent of Aeroflot,
said he had signed an agreement to reserve the planes before
Boeing's offer expired. "If
the contract with Boeing is torn up, Aeroflot will suffer huge
losses," Lebedev told a news conference. "We did not
want this to happen, so we reserved the planes ourselves on the
terms offered to Aeroflot." Aeroflot's
bid to add the long-range airliners to its 90-plane fleet has
become entangled in politics as Russia seeks to wrap up talks
with the U.S. on joining the World Trade Organization. Meanwhile,
a Kremlin push to parley a 5 percent stake amassed by a
state-owned bank into a strategic holding in EADS, the European
aerospace giant, has made it tough to turn down the Airbus offer
flat.
A
top aide to President Vladimir Putin said last week that Russia
would like to build its stake in EADS as part of a wider
industrial partnership -- a proposal quickly rebuffed by the
company's Franco-German management team. The
Kremlin's EADS gambit is nevertheless likely to feature at talks
in France later this week between Putin, French President
Jacques Chirac and German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
OPTIONS OPEN
A
source close to Lebedev's NRC said the company had signed the
deal to keep Aeroflot's options open in case the airline's full
board eventually decides to buy the Dreamliner. Boeing
plans to launch production in 2008 and has already landed 377
firm orders. The source said that, without firming up the order,
Aeroflot risked losing its place in the queue for the
hot-selling Boeing plane. "In
fact they gave Aeroflot a possibility to keep Boeing's offer.
Otherwise Boeing would have sold the planes (to another
customer)," the source told Reuters. Terms
offered to Aeroflot by Boeing include first deliveries in 2010
and a $10 million discount for each plane. Boeing
confirmed the deal. "We do not deny that there is a deal,
but we do not comment on the details of contracts with our
customers," spokeswoman Olga Kostrubina told Reuters. Aeroflot
badly needs to strengthen its fleet, which is made up largely of
ageing Soviet-designed aircraft. Analysts say it can ill afford
to wait on Airbus, which has not sold a single A350 and would
only be able to deliver in the next decade. Separately, Aeroflot
announced that its board had approved the lease of 12 Airbus 320
airliners as well as six Boeing-built MD-11 cargo planes in
2006-2007. The decision to lease Airbuses follows a similar deal
to hire 12 planes from Royal Bank of Scotland and General
Electric Capital Aviation Services. Aeroflot is likely to lease
the new planes from the same companies, Aeroflot spokesman
Viktor Sokolov told Reuters.
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