Willie Walsh will pass the controls of IAG to Luis Gallego at the British Airways and Iberia owner's annual meeting on Tuesday, where shareholders will be asked to stump up billions of euros to help it through the coronavirus crisis. Former pilot Walsh delayed his departure from IAG, which he created by dragging BA and Iberia into the modern age of budget flying, taking a tough line on unions and cutting costs. Walsh, who has been CEO of BA since 2005 and of IAG since it was created in 2011, faces one last test as Institutional Shareholder Services have called to reject his farewell GBP883,000, although the vote on the airline group's remuneration report is non-binding. Meanwhile Gallego, a Spanish insider who turned around Iberia, will have to cut costs, while managing damaged relations with unions and politicians and stepping up the group's battle with Ryanair and easyJet. IAG's position is expecting to be strengthened by raising E2.75b from shareholders in a rights issue which is backed by its biggest shareholder Qatar. "Major shareholders are satisfied that IAG's equity raise will be enough to weather the crisis… or at least that's their hope," one banking source said. At BA, where 12,000 jobs are set to go and new terms have been set for long-serving staff, unions have vowed to fight and the British government said the plan was a "breach of faith" after it accessed state funds to pay wages during the crisis.<br/>
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Qantas developed a plan 10 years ago to outsource all airport ground handling work by 2020, raising questions about its claim that last month's move to sack all 2400 remaining ground workers was a consequence of the COVID-19 crisis. The airline said in August that outsourcing Qantas and Jetstar baggage handling, aircraft cleaning and ground crew work to third-party contractors at 11 major Australian airports would save it around $100m a year as "part of its COVID recovery plan". But an internal company document from 2010 shows that Qantas had long considered the move as a way to simplify the business and cut costs. The "private and confidential" document outlines a "2020 Vision" strategy for the airline which includes "BTW (below the wing) ground handling exited" by this year. The document outlines that the strategy would deliver a "quantum reduction in staff numbers" at airports and enable Qantas to be "more focused on process rather than people management". Qantas management canvassed the strategy internally in 2010. While it is unclear whether the company adopted the "2020 Vision" strategy in full, the document shows outsourcing all "below the wing" work has been part of the executive team's thinking since before the bruising 2011 industrial dispute. Transport Workers Unions national secretary Michael Kaine seized on the document as "utterly shocking" evidence that Qantas wasn't sacking more because of the pandemic but as part of a "pre-arranged plan".<br/>