The Czech state is willing to provide loan guarantees for the airline Smartwings worth CZK 900m, but it has several conditions. Two of the most important are that it rename itself ČSA and that it not pay a dividend to its owners for 10 years. That was the news that Minister of Transportation Karel Havlíček brought to the country’s president Miloš Zeman and his expert team at a recent meeting. Havlíček said he’d told the company’s owners they would also have to maintain the jobs of 1,500 employees. For their part, Havlíček says the owners claimed they’d be willing to inject CZK 1.6bn of their own money into the company, CZK 600m of which they’d already invested. “The state support would not come through an injection or a purchase of shares but in guarantees. At the moment, we’re discussing guarantees of between CZK 500m and CZK 900m, I would see around CZK 800m.” He said the president supports the plan and that he would prefer a general consensus across all the political parties in the country, though this was never going to happen. “I don’t understand why it’s Smartwings that’s getting such support from the government,” said Mikuláš Ferjenčík, a deputy of the opposition Pirates party. “The whole country has huge economic problems, lots of firms are laying people off and need loans. But right at this moment, the government is expending a huge amount of energy for a company that from the point of view of the national economy doesn’t play a key role.”
