A potential sale could make tens of millions of pounds and enable Monarch’s former owners, Greybull Capital, to donation towards the £60 million bill spent by the government to repatriate passengers following the airline’s collapse last month.
The right to sell Monarch’s slots has been pushed by administrators KPMG after it emerged that Airport Co-ordination Ltd (ACL), the industry body tasked with governing slots allocation, said it believed the rights should revert to it and be handed out to other airlines.
According to The Times, no airline administrator under UK law has attempted to sell airport slots after a carrier has failed.
Monarch’s 18 daily pairs of take-offs and landings slots at Gatwick are understood to be worth as much as £60 million at open auction because access to London’s second airport is so restricted, the newspaper reports.
It is known that Gatwick’s two biggest operators, EasyJet and British Airways owner IAG covet Monarch’s former slots.
Controversy over the ownership of the slots has intensified due to concerns that if their sale raises enough money, Greybull as Monarch’s main creditor could end up making a profit on its administration.
Allaying that criticism last week, Greybull pledged to share some of the proceeds to cover passenger repatriation costs of Monarch’s 110,000 overseas passengers.
The High Court action comes as Labour MP Frank Field, chairman of the Commons work and pensions committee, revealed he is making further inquiries of the Pension Protection Fund (PPF) and the Pensions Regulator over the deal in which Greybull took control of Monarch in 2014 for £1.
In that deal with the previous owners, the Mantegazza family, the Monarch pension scheme was placed into the PPF, which became a junior shareholder in Monarch but only a secondary creditor.
Field is critical of the Mantegazzas, and is reported by The Times as saying: “Had the Mantegazzas had the threat of punitive fines such as we have recommended hanging over them, this deal would have been concluded much more satisfactorily.”
