Mexico can't sell presidential jet, tries odd sales pitches

Mexican President Andres Manuel López Obrador has made selling off the luxurious presidential jet a centerpiece of his austerity program, but there's just one problem: Nobody, it seems, wants to buy the white elephant. López Obrador said Tuesday the Boeing Dreamliner will be returned to Mexico after a year on sale in the United States, where it piled up about $1.5m in maintenance costs. Bought by his predecessor, the jet is expensive to run and now configured to carry only 80 people, albeit with a full presidential suite with a bedroom and private bath. It became a symbol of López Obrador's campaign against high-living public officials in a country where half the population lives in poverty. “They abused (their privileges). They even used planes to go play golf,” López Obrador said. While the Boeing 787 drew some interest while parked at an airfield in Victorville, California, over the last year, López Obrador said potential buyers had been unable to obtain financing for the estimated sale price of $130m. That's a bit more than half what Mexico paid for the plane in 2012. "It was a bad deal from the start," the president sniped. Among the ideas López Obrador is now entertaining is to barter it off in exchange for medical equipment, to sell it to a consortium of companies for executive incentive programs or rent it out by the hour, in hopes of paying off the remainder of outstanding loans on the plane. Gone are the hopes it would raise a lot of money for anti-poverty programs. Mexico is now just hoping to cut its losses on the plane, which is too expensive to reconfigure back into a commercial airliner that normally carries as many as 300 passengers.<br/>