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Farnborough: Nine years after France's top plane executive shook hands in Baghdad on a $500 million deal to sell airliners to the government of Saddam Hussain, Airbus finally conceded yesterday the deal was off.
Airbus sales chief John Leahy ordered the deal removed from its backlog in response to an inquiry from Reuters about the long-forgotten deal at this week's Farnborough Air Show.
The deal to supply five A310 passenger jets had been on the Airbus order book since its then director Jean Pierson clinched the deal in 1989, as Iraq's skies reopened following travel curbs imposed during its eight-year war with Iran.
The technical status of the order from a defunct sovereign government was unclear, but Airbus has anyway stopped making the A310. The engines on the planes would have been supplied by US supplier Pratt & Whitney, part of United Technologies.
The 240-seat planes were sold at a time when French-led businesses were doing significant business in Iraq, which had good ties with France and several western countries until the Kuwait invasion.
History
Airbus was then a four-nation consortium headquartered in France and is now part of aerospace group EADS.
Post-Saddam Iraq returned to the market for new airliners earlier this year when it awarded a $2.2 billion deal to buy 30 airliners to Airbus's arch-rival Boeing. Leahy complained that Airbus, Boeing's main global rival, had not been allowed to bid for that contract.
"We were never asked for a quote, which is extremely unusual for an order of that size," he said. "At the very least it is not a great negotiating tactic; by offering exclusivity, you don't usually get the best price."
A Boeing spokesman had no immediate comment.
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