The Chief Executive Officer of Air Peace, Allen Onyema, has narrated how his company suffered a $2m loss to a Tunisia-based leasing company.
Onyema revealed this experience while speaking at the 29th annual conference of the League of Airport and Aviation Correspondents on Thursday in Lagos.
The airline boss said that when this happened, he refused to pursue the case because at the time, Nigeria was blacklisted for breach of contract.
He said, “A foreign company defrauded us of $2 million. They told us they wanted to buy aircraft parts and needed a sum of $2 million.
If I had stopped them from taking the money, Nigeria would have been further blacklisted. What you would be hearing is that Nigerian airlines are unreliable.
“For the sake of the aviation industry, I decided not to stop this transaction. The company took our money and never came back. They stole our $2 million.
“The Nigerian government got in touch with them. They said it was a private business matter and they would see what they could do, and they ran away with that $2 million.”
He said his decision not to pursue legal action was influenced by Nigeria’s unofficial blacklisting at the time due to previous breaches of aircraft lease agreements by some local airlines.
“I’m not going to go into that because it’s not totally the fault of those airlines either.
