MALÉV TENDER SUED

’ASBK Property Management Ltd has attached a bank guarantee about 17 million dollars and a confirmation statement about the flight cooperation with the Polish airlines LOT to its bid last Thursday but the State Property Management and Holding Company still would not consider their bid for the tender of Malév’, Ferenc Kovács, head of ASBK Ltd said to Magyar Nemzet.

He said there was only one point where the offer of AirBridge was better as ASBK Ltd offered HUF 150 million but it undertook a capital increase of HUF 9 billion while AirBridge Company offered only HUF 4 billion. Informed sources claim behind the offer of ASBK Ltd there was OTP Bank. On Saturday AirBridge also announced they were considering a legal process while Boris Abramovich, partial owner of KrasAir and AirBridge expressed his shock over the case in a Moscow daily. ’We have met all the conditions. We have been told we are the winners and now they stop the privatization. How can this be possible? We have become parts of a political struggle’, he said. Péter Leonov, member of the board of directors of AirBridge said yesterday to MTI they had agreed with the representatives of the State Privatization and Holding Company though they had not signed any contract, they could only see the draft of the contract. Minister of Finance János Veres said after the privatization of Budapest Airport Company they would make an attempt again to sell Malév.

Translated by Péter Szentmihályi Szabó