Originally Posted by
FD1971
To be honest with you, I spent quite some time camouflaging income streams with new internal pricing mechanisms, so with all due respect, give me a weekend looking at the books of IAG and all of a sudden (completely legal) IB is highly profitable and both Vueling and BA are bucket cases...
Hence, I do not really care which part of a Group is profitable as long as we have quite some room when it comes to cost and revenue allocation...
Before moving on from the digression about IAG - I think it would be rather difficult to do some dubious internal transfer pricing, given BAs pensions trustees wanting to grab all the cash they can (and the separate operating companies they establish and the disclosure of internal transfers on balance sheets/cash flows): if WW could legally have done it, I think he already would have. That said, the counter-argument is of course that he needs IB to make losses in order to force through cost reductions (aka cutting staff costs), so perhaps it's a wash.
Still, I can't help but think that it just shows that the accusations against EK being a scam are really just based on innuendo:
- it's possible anywhere to play with balance sheets and accounts all perfectly legally to highlight and obscure the true financial position (or at least, minimise existential risks)
- EK is based in Dubai
- Dubai is an autocracy with less than transparent (by western standards) politics and economics
- Dubai has debt, so because of this opacity, they "must" be giving it to EK
- therefore it is likely that EK cooks the books just because they can
It's a rather unfair indictment, I think, given the fact that every insinuation and tenuous link in the chain has an innocent and more plausible explanation.