Word: baing
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...Britain's Office of Fair Trading earlier today hit BA with a record $247 million fine after the airline admitted to colluding with rival Virgin Atlantic over fuel surcharges both airlines added to ticket prices. Later on Wednesday, the U.S. Department of Justice, which was pursuing a similar case against BA in parallel with the one brought by the OFT, issued BA with its own $300 million penalty...
...occasions between Aug. 2004 and Jan. 2006, the OFT found, the two companies discussed or briefed each other about proposed changes to the levy, which is meant to help airlines offset the soaring cost of fuel. In that period, the surcharges rose 12-fold to $122 for a typical BA or Virgin long-haul flight. BA has owned up to the collusion. "Anti-competitive behavior is entirely unacceptable," BA chief Willie Walsh said Wednesday. "We condemn it unreservedly." For its part, Virgin is expected to escape a fine, since it blew the whistle on the collusion...
...size of the fine won't have taken Walsh by surprise. In May BA set aside some $700 million to cover the fines and legal bills relating to the OFT and DoJ cases. And though the British fine was a record, it could have been even worse: The OFT was free to fine BA up to 10% of its global sales, which last year amounted to some $17 billion...
...maintained its "buy" rating on BA stock in a research note, and another London-based airline analyst said the fine left BA's outlook "unchanged." But it's been a turbulent year for Britain's largest carrier. The specter earlier this year of cabin crew strikes, though eventually averted, triggered mass passenger cancellations and diluted the airline's results. Operating profit in the year to April slid 13%. The airline insists it's not been helped by tough security measures still in place at U.K. airports, where passengers are limited to one item of hand luggage and have...
...general Jay Garner, was essentially shut out of that process. He and ORHA were then shut out of Iraq less than a month after his arrival, replaced by Ambassador L. Paul Bremer and CPA (the Coalition Provisional Authority), which almost immediately made two huge and irreversible mistakes: the de-Ba'athification of the country's government (which meant that most of bureaucrats who knew how to manage the country were dispensed with) and the disbanding of the 500,000-man Iraqi army, which might have helped restore order, but which now became a vast pool of the angrily unemployed...