Azernews.Az

By Bloomberg

Malaysia appointed outgoing Aer Lingus Group Plc Chief Executive Officer Christoph Mueller to lead a revamp of its flag-carrier airline following two high- profile plane crashes that killed 537 people.

Mueller, 52, will take charge of a new company that’s being carved out of publicly traded Malaysian Airline System Bhd., state sovereign wealth fund Khazanah Nasional Bhd, the carrier’s majority investor, said in a statement today.

The German, who will leave Aer Lingus by May 1 at the latest before the new airline, Malaysia Airlines Bhd., starts operations in July, “has a strong record of transformation and turnarounds in the aviation industry,” according to Khazanah.

Malaysia Air will be taken private as part of the revival plan, with Khazanah buying out smaller investors for 1.38 billion ringgit ($398 million). The carrier was already losing money before Flight MH370 vanished on March 8 while en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing and MH17 was shot down over Ukraine four months later, hurting passenger confidence.

“It’s imperative that we have the best available talent with the expertise and experience to help the progress of the restructuring effort further forward,” Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak said in today’s release.

Sabena, TUI

Mueller, who had already agreed to leave Aer Lingus, will have spent five years at the Irish company, where he expanded trans-Atlantic services and fended off takeover bids from Ryanair Holdings Plc, Europe’s biggest low-cost airline.

The executive has also worked on turnaround projects elsewhere, pursuing an aggressive job-cutting strategy at Sabena SA, before the Belgian flag-carrier’s bankruptcy in 2001 and partial reinvention as Brussels Airlines.

Before Aer Lingus, Mueller, who completed an advanced management program at Harvard Business School, was executive aviation director at TUI Travel Plc and chief financial officer of DHL Worldwide before it was acquired by Deutsche Post AG.

Malaysian Airlines is engaged in discussions to bring Mueller to his new post as earlier as March 1, according to Khazanah, which will delist the company on Dec. 15 as part of a 6 billion-ringgit restructuring plan that aims to scrap 6,000 jobs and restore profitability in three years.

Mueller will be joining a team that includes Mohd Nadziruddin Mohd Basri, who was appointed as chief restructuring officer in October.

Longest Search

The revamp will proceed against a background of continued searches in the southern Indian Ocean for MH370, no debris from which has yet been discovered despite the most extensive effort to find a missing plane in modern aviation history. Air safety experts have said it’s unlikely that tracking systems could have been deactivated without the knowledge of the jet’s captain.

Debris from the Ukraine crash site in territory partially held by pro-Moscow insurgents has been recovered only in the past few weeks for analysis in the Netherlands, where a large number of those killed on MH17 originated. An initial investigation suggested the plane had been shot down by a surface-to-air missile, a weapon that the U.S. has said could only have come from the rebels’ Russian backers.

Aer Lingus spokesman Declan Kearny said today that the Dublin-based airline is still assessing candidates to replace Mueller after announcing in July that he would step down.