The Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Air Peace, Allen Onyema, has called on President Tinubu to dissolve Nigeria Air, stating that the whole project is a charade and not what is needed in the country at the moment.
Mr. Onyema, in his right of reply to the claims made by the former Aviation Minister, Hadi Sirika on Sunday, said that Air Peace stopped Dubai operations due to “lack of capacity” also said that it is very difficult to believe all that he told Nigerians in the past after peddling falsehood about his airline.
Speaking at Arise Exclusives, he said “This is a minister trying to fool the entire nation in his desperate bid to fool everybody to win the nation. He was peddling falsehood on Air Peace. So, how do we as a nation believe every other thing he was saying out there?
“The Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority is there. You can contact them, they are the regulators. He was in charge. He signed the import permit of those aircrafts. You cannot import any aircraft into the country without the minister of aviation approving. He did all that and he knew that those airplanes were not leased. They were not rented. They were fully paid for and he told the entire world that we leased those airplanes just to make us look bad and at the same time, praising his Ethiopian partners,” he said.
He also condemned the shareholding pattern of Nigeria Air, stating that even though the Ethiopians have 49% of the shareholding, they are not bringing any penny into the company.
“It is only the Nigerian companies that are going to bring in money, SACHO and MRS. The document is with us here. Ethiopia is not bringing a penny into Nigeria. Ethiopia will pay rentals for their own planes for five years. Even if they pay the 122 thousand, Air peace alone is worth over two billion dollars.”
The Air Peace boss also commented on the unveiling of Nigeria Air, three days to the end of the past administration. He said the court orders were never vacated as word-of-mouth vacation does not count.
