France has no plans for now to sell its 14% stake in Air France-KLM, Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire said on Thursday, pressing the group’s new CE to focus on increasing competitiveness. Le Maire was reacting to a warning from the group’s new Canadian boss, Benjamin Smith, to Air France’s labour unions that the government was prepared to offload its shares and they should not rely on the state to bail them out. Smith, who took over the group last week, faces the unenviable task of having to overcome union resistance to reduce the French unit’s swollen cost base while keeping increasingly frustrated Dutch staff on side. A wave of strikes at Air France this spring cost the group some E350m and led to the ouster of Smith’s predecessor. “Today the priority is to turn around Air France,” Le Maire told franceinfo. “Selling off the state’s stake in Air France is not part of Benjamin Smith’s action plan. It is not an option on the table today.” On Thursday, Smith told the Financial Times that the French government should not and would not bail out Air France to shield it from competition, even if there were some in the company that believed the state’s holding offered them protection. Le Maire himself warned Air France staff in May that the government would not come to the airline’s rescue.<br/>