Thousands left stranded after Spanair goes bust

January 30, 2012  •  Business & Finance, Lead2, National News, Travel  •  0 Comments

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• Spanair goes bust leaving thousands standed

THOUSANDS of holidaymakers have been left stranded across Spain after Spanair abruptly went bust.

The Spanish airline cancelled all its future flights with just half an hour’s notice affecting more than 23,000 passengers over the weekend.

Its last scheduled flight landed at 10pm on Friday, leaving passengers scrambling for other means of transport.

“The Spanair management regrets this and apologises to all those people who are affected by this situation,” the company said.

But the Spanish government has now announced it is set to take legal action against the collapsed airline for suspending operations without proper warning.

The public works ministry said in a statement it was launching ‘sanction proceedings for two serious breaches of the Air Safety Law which could lead to fines of 4.5m euros in each case.’

It comes after Spanair, which was founded in 1986 and has about 2,000 staff, failed to convince Qatar Airways to form a tie-up and take a 49 per cent share in the Barcelona-based airline.

Moreover the Catalonia regional authorities, who own part of the company and had been keeping it afloat though subsidies, revealed it will no longer inject funds into the airline.

“When we learned that the merger was not going to happen in time and that the Catalonia government was not going to contribute more funds, the most sensible and safe decision was to close down operations,” said the company’s chairman Ferran Soriano.

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