In 2016, Aeromar seemed to be on the other side. At that time, Synergy Group –then the largest shareholder of the Colombian Avianca– announced an investment of 100 million dollars in the company, which would become Avianca México; However, the firm headed by Germán Efromovich backed down, arguing that it needed to see greater stability in Aeromar’s finances to complete the operation.
“It never seemed like a good idea to me to do something with Aeromar, and we are not going to make any type of investment at all. It doesn’t add much, we already have a shared code with Aeromexicowhich is bigger, with more frequencies,” Anko van der Werff, then CEO of Avianca, told the media in October 2019.
However, for the directors of Aeromar the story was different. For them, Avianca’s investment intention – the closest that the company would have in its history – fell for other reasons.
“Avianca withdraws because it entered into a difficult internal situation. The second was because they canceled the airport from Mexico City, the one from Texcoco. how they wanted a hub international and now there are going to be three airports, since he saw that his model was no longer viable”, said Danilo Correa, general director of Aeromar, in a meeting with the media in October 2021. “90% of why the decision was not taken transaction is in these two factors”.
Even then, Aeromar’s dreams were ambitious: triple its fleet in the next five years to have 30 ATR -42 and ATR-72 aircraft, with an investment of 50 to 100 million dollars. And when the airline director was asked what would be different compared to Avianca’s failed investment, his answer seemed simple: investment banking was involved in the process.
Some time later, the workers would give an account of an effort that did not succeed either: that of a credit for 75 million dollars from the development bankwhich in mid-2022 was still being negotiated, and which tied with another plan, but from the federal government: to have its own airline.
One of the proposals contemplated a conversion of the financing into a participation of the company, where the federal government would enter as a shareholder. “We have a plan that has already been presented,” said José Humberto Gual, general secretary of the Aviation Pilots Union Association (ASPA) of Mexico, in June 2022.
“The same Mr. President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador In a conversation I had with him, he told me that both the Mexican workers and the pilots counted on him, he told us that he supported the government to keep this airline afloat,” he added.