The Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA) has attributed reasons for withholding the Air Transport License (ATL) of Nigeria’s Azman Airline to the need for the airline to show commitment to offsetting the over N1.2 billion debt it owed the agency.
Equally, cited as another reason why the ATL of the airline was being held was the need for it to provide the required documentation for its operational license renewal.
The development came following the inability of the airline to operate yesterday leading to many of its passengers getting stranded across the country’s airports.
Confirming the development to some journalists, the director general of the NCAA, Captain Musa Nuhu, who said the withholding of Azman Airlines’ license had to do with the accumulated debts incurred through the Passengers’ Service Charges it collected on behalf of the regulatory agency from passengers which the airline refused to remit, however, hinted that the move which was not only targeted at the airline will also be extended to other debtor airlines.
ATL is one of the critical requirements needed to be obtained from the NCAA by any airline before it goes into commercial flight operations.
According to the conditions given by the NCAA DG, before Azman can resume operations it must among others present a valid tax clearance as part of the required documentation and sign a Memorandum of Understanding on how it intends to defray its accumulated debts to the NCAA.
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Once the airline meets all the conditions, the director general said it will automatically be granted the approvals for the renewal of its expired license.
”This is not a charge and this is not their money, it’s monies collected in trust for us from passengers and they squandered it. We are not asking them for an interest rate, no penalties, we just want our funds remitted. We asked them to sit and negotiate as they collected on our behalf and refused to remit.
“I cannot keep explaining to the Minister, to the Accountant General, to the Presidency why we cannot remit money meant for them to them. We have been forced to carry out this action,” the NCAA DG declared.
Like the airlines, the DG said even the government agencies and other businesses within and outside the sector were all battling challenges just like others and for this fact, the regulatory were not demanding that the entire debt should be paid once but insisted that the debtor airlines should sign the commitment on the mode of payments of the debts.
His words: “We know that if we tell them to give us all these monies at the same time, it is very difficult and not possible, so, what we have put in place in NCAA and to prevent the debts from growing, we have put in place a tripartite agreement; the NCAA, airlines and the airlines’ banks. So, once those funds go to the bank, the 5 per cent TSA/CSC is automatically deducted and goes into the NCAA bank and NCAA will share it with the other sister agencies on a pre-determined ratio as entrenched in the 2006 Civil Aviation Act.
“For the legacy debts, what we have done is to enter an MoU with all the operators; we know they can’t pay all at a time, but they have to pay us a reasonable amount of money on a monthly basis at least.
“What we have said is that if they don’t pay this legacy debt, we are not going to renew their licenses; AOC, ATL. That is one of the conditions and most of them have entered into the agreement.”
The NCAA DG had recently raised the alarm about how the airlines were indebted to all the government agencies to the tune of N42 billion for a long period of time.
While the airlines including the dead ones owed the NCAA a whopping B19 billion, the airlines owed the Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria (FAAN), N18 billion and the Nigerians Airspace Management Agency (NAMA) N5 billion respectively.
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