Biman to choose new MD in ten days
The board of Biman Bangladesh Airlines will choose a new managing director within the next 10 days, its chairman Mahbub Jamil said yesterday.
“We will take a decision on appointing a new managing director in seven to ten days,” Jamil told The Daily Star.
He made the remarks a day after its immediate Managing Director MA Momen was transferred to the Ministry of Agriculture as a joint secretary. The government appointed Momen in early 2006 as the chief executive of the national carrier that had turned into a public limited company (PLC) in July last year.
The government also freed the airline of its liabilities of over Tk 1,700 crore with the Bangladesh Petroleum Corporation and Civil Aviation Authority aiming at giving a fresh lease of life to the airline that posted a loss of about Tk 273 crore in the fiscal year 2006-07, down from its record loss of Tk 454 a year ago.
Biman now expects that its losses would be below Tk 100 crore in the fiscal year 2007-08.
Since its inception as a PLC, Biman's management took various steps including cutting of over 1800 jobs and operating extra flights to various destinations such as Kuala Lumpur to optimise its revenue.
Biman had also moved couple of months earlier to appoint a new chief executive from outside the bureaucracy and received 24 applications for the post. Out of the applicants, Biman board short-listed 5 applications.
'But we have found none of them having the quality to run the carrier with dynamism,” a director of Biman's board told The Daily Star earlier.
Biman's Chairman Mahbub Jamil, also a special adviser to Chief Adviser, however said they would consider all the options on the table.
He said if a CEO cannot be appointed within a few days, the senior most executive director of Biman will take charge as the acting managing director.
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