Cathay Pacific and Lufthansa Group airlines have signed an agreement on code-sharing and frequent flyer cooperation. The agreement, which launches on April 26, includes Lufthansa units Austrian Airlines and Swiss International Air Lines. Under the deal, passengers from Lufthansa’s Frankfurt and Munich hubs, and Austrian’s Vienna and Swiss’s Zurich hubs will have more flight options to Sydney, Melbourne, Cairns and Auckland, via Hong Kong on Cathay flights. Cathay will put its codes on Lufthansa Group flights to fourteen European destinations. Lufthansa Group CE Carsten Spohr said of the “ground-breaking partnership” that it “strengthens our global network … and further improves our airlines' offering on Asian routes.” He said the cooperation with Cathay “is another key building block in our Asia strategy and supplements existing commercial joint ventures with All Nippon Airways, Singapore Airlines and Air China and other Star Alliance partners in Asia.” The code-share agreement is not as extensive as the joint ventures Lufthansa has with those carriers. This is the first time Lufthansa will code-share with a oneworld member airline.<br/>
star
Colombia-based airline Avianca filed a counter lawsuit in New York on Monday in the latest round of a no-holds-barred legal battle between two Latin American tycoons over the strategic control of one of the region’s biggest carriers and its mooted alliance with United Airlines. Avianca and Gérman Efromovich, the carrier’s biggest shareholder, accused Kingsland Holdings, its second-biggest shareholder, of leaking boardroom secrets in an attempt to obstruct the negotiations with United. The lawsuit against Kingsland, a holding company for Avianca shareholder Roberto Kriete, follows a suit filed by Kingsland three weeks ago. The countersuit “concerns a disloyal director who . . . has worked actively to undermine the company’s strategic goals for his own selfish purposes . . . [and] has engaged in a smear campaign,” Avianca said in its complaint in New York State Supreme Court. The motion seeks to dismiss Kingsland’s claims and to overturn its injunction to stop Avianca’s talks with United. Kriete, a Salvadorean tycoon, has called the mooted United-Avianca strategic alliance a “sweetheart” arrangement which ignored better offers from other airlines and instead seeks to “shore up [Efromovich’s] other financially strapped business concerns”. Avianca responded on Monday that “Kriete has attempted to pressure United into abandoning any negotiations with Avianca because he perceives such a deal would not service his narrow self-interest and his other personal ventures in the aviation industry”. The flurry of legal action comes after United and Avianca announced in January plans for a strategic alliance, a $200m rights issue by Avianca and also its potential merger with OceanAir, a smaller Brazilian airline controlled by Efromovich.<br/>