SAA: No salaries from 1 May, R15.8bn losses over three years & still no final business rescue plan. SAA staff will not be paid from 1 May because the airline “doesn’t have the funds to pay staff salaries in May”. That emerged in Friday’s terse meeting of Parliament’s public spending watchdog, the Standing Committee on Public Accounts (Scopa), when friction between the minister and business rescue practitioners sparked.

There are two ways that a “new airline” can be created to take the place of South African Airways in its current form, Minister of Public Enterprises Pravin Gordhan said on Friday.

The one would be to create an entirely new company and trying to acquire a few of the most important assets of the old SAA. The other option would be to restructure or reorganise the existing SAA by doing away with what is not functioning in order to keep what is central to the mission of resulting the “new airline”.

SAA has been in business rescue since December.

Gordhan told Parliament’s Standing Committee on Public Accounts (Scopa) in a briefing on Friday that due to the devastating impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the global airline industry, (re)starting any airline would have to be at a very low level of operation.

Asked how much money would be needed to create such a “new airline”, Gordhan said he would have to come back to Parliament with an answer. He described the theme that came from Scopa members’ questions to him as that of which came first, the chicken or the egg.