Cathay Pacific said Tuesday that the Hong Kong government had agreed to extend the drawdown period for a HK$7.8b ($1.01b) loan facility by a year to June 2022, giving it more flexibility to manage liquidity. The bridge loan was part of a $5b rescue package led by the Hong Kong government and Cathay's major shareholders Swire Pacific Ltd and Air China Ltd last year to help the airline weather the COVID-19 crisis. Cathay CE Augustus Tang said the airline had not yet drawn down on the loan as it adopted a suite of measures to save cash, but the extension would give it more flexibility to manage its liquidity position. Cathay had HK$28b of liquidity as of December 2020 and also raised HK$6.74b from a convertible bond issue in February and $650m in a bond issue last month. The airline's move to access as much liquidity as possible at a time when passenger numbers are down by more than 99% from 2019 levels follows a decision by rival Singapore Airlines Ltd last month to issue S$6.2b ($4.69b) of convertible bonds. The Singapore Airlines convertible bonds, underwritten by majority shareholder Temasek Holdings, were an optional part of a state investor-led S$15b rescue package announced last year.<br/>
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Nearly seven years after Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was shot down over eastern Ukraine, the trial in a Dutch court of three Russians and a Ukrainian accused of involvement in the downing moved Monday to the crucial merits phase, when evidence will be discussed by lawyers and judges. Families of some of the victims were present in court to watch the latest hearing in the long-running case. “It’s a very difficult day for us. You know, it’s now the first day of the prosecution,” said Evert van Zijtveld, whose daughter Frederique and son Robert-Jan were among the 298 passengers and crew killed when the Boeing 777 was shot down on July 17, 2014. The trial that has progressed through a series of preliminary hearings since opening in March 2020 will in the coming days begin examining the huge case file pieced together after a years-long international investigation. “The file consists of about 65,000 pages and many hundreds of hours of visual and audio material. It’s such a large case that it’s simply not possible to speak about every detail," Presiding Judge Hendrik Steenhuis said at the start of Monday's hearing, before summarizing the case. “Up until today, no one has come forward and said that they are even partially responsible for what happened," Steenhuis said. The first discussions of evidence are scheduled for Tuesday. The four suspects were not in the courtroom near Schiphol Airport and are being tried in their absence. They face life sentences if convicted of murdering the 298 people who died when the flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur was blown out of the sky above conflict-torn eastern Ukraine.<br/>
The NSW government secretly offered $50m in taxpayer funds to Qantas to head off a bidding war with rival states to keep the airline’s global headquarters in Sydney. Under heavy financial pressure from the effects of the global pandemic, Qantas announced last September it was reconsidering the location of its headquarters in a move heavily criticised by federal Trade Minister Simon Birmingham as a “blatant appeal for corporate welfare”. Nevertheless, a week after a confidential package was outlined in a letter from Treasurer Dominic Perrottet to Qantas CE Alan Joyce, the company announced in April that agreements were being finalised to keep the national carrier’s headquarters in NSW. The agreements were to be commercial-in-confidence. However, the Herald can reveal the contents of the Treasurer’s proposal after his letter was included in a trove of documents tabled to State Parliament. It gives the first indication of the lengths the NSW government had been willing to go to, to entice Qantas to remain in Mascot, in Sydney’s inner-south, after the company announced a review of its property footprint. The lure of the company’s 3500-strong workforce sparked a bidding war with Queensland and Victoria. Perrottet’s offer came with strings attached, including that the airline must create an additional 2000 jobs and run its new ultra long-haul flights exclusively out of Sydney for five years. The offer remains the subject of ongoing negotiations even though the three-way tussle ended in early May with Qantas’s statement to the ASX.<br/>