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New Rolls-Royce boss slams ‘mismanagement’
from Monday 22 May 2023
by cityam
LUKE THOMAS
THE NEW chief of Rolls-Royce says the company has been “grossly mismanaged”, describing financials the engineering group faced in 2019 as the “worst I have seen in my career”.
In an interview with the Financial Times, Tufan Erginbilgic also defended his recent hires of oil executives from his previous employer, BP.
Erginbilgic took up the reins at the FTSE 100-listed business in January after 20 years at BP where he became CEO.
Erginbilgic has since appointed BP executives Helen McCabe and Nicola Grady-Smith to his team in a senior management shakeup.
Erginbilgic said despite a “deep engineering capability”, employees “have not been led the right way”.
Earlier this year, he made headlines and spooked investors by labelling the firm a “burning platform”.
Now, after years of underperformance, the company’s early 2023 profit announcements exceeded expectations, with a boost from an uptick in international travel. This, Erginbilgic says, is a far cry from 2019, when even prepandemic financials showed dire operative leverage.
To continue improvements, Erginbilgic says he will be targeting cuts to spending on non-core projects and renegotiations of existing sales and maintenance contracts. There will be a renewed focus on paying down debt and generating cash, to drive a global engineering leader that is “high performing, competitive, resilient and growing”.
The CAA has given Wizz Air until January to settle court judgements made against it
‘UK’s worst airline’ owes Brits a colossal £5m in unpaid refunds
JESSICA FRANK-KEYES
BRITS are owed £5m in unpaid refunds from low-cost airline Wizz Air, a Sunday Times investigation has revealed.
Previously dubbed ‘Britain’s worst airline’, Wizz Air is yet to pay out £4,950,479 across 881 outstanding county court judgments, with claims from £47 up to £10,358. Unresolved judgements date back to April 2018.
A spokesperson said: “Wizz Air has resolved the vast majority of the CCJ cases and we are in the process of updating the court records to reflect this.”
It comes after the UK’s Civil Aviation Authority criticised the airline in December for “unacceptable” passenger treatment and “far higher” numbers of unresolved complaints.
