Kenya plans to inject 20b shillings ($176m) of capital into the country’s cash-strapped national airline, which is battling to survive after years of losses and a mounting debt pile. The funding, detailed in supplementary budget documents submitted to parliament, “is dependent on certain restructuring milestones,” Kenya Airways Chairman Michael Joseph said by text message on Thursday. The capital injection emerged alongside a Bloomberg News report that Kenya Airways has selected financial advisers to help evaluate options to restructure its debt load, which totaled 92.5b shillings at the end of 2020. The government had been planning to nationalize the airline, already 48.9% state owned, before abandoning the plan last month. While many airlines around the world ran into trouble after the coronavirus pandemic hammered global travel, Kenya Airways’s financial troubles pre-date the crisis. The size of the government’s stake is the result of an earlier state-backed restructuring which saw some lenders swap debt for equity. Air France-KLM is a small shareholder with a 7.76% stake. <br/>
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Indonesia's holiday island of Bali on Thursday welcomed its first direct international flight in nearly two years, as the government plots a full reopening of the popular tourist destination. But the jetliner only carried a couple of handfuls of travelers, leaving any schedule for future flights unclear and the tourism-dependent island with little hope that its plight might soon be over. A Garuda Indonesia flight from Japan's Narita International Airport arrived with 12 people on board -- six Japanese and six Indonesians -- Nyoman Gede Gunadika, head of the Bali Tourism Board, told Nikkei Asia. Since Indonesia has not restarted its visa on arrival process nor come up with a tourism visa scheme, the Japanese nationals are arriving on business visas, Gunadika added. While Indonesia had opened Bali to flights from select countries in October, no direct flights had arrived at the island before the Garuda flight. Indonesia's flagship carrier had planned for a weekly flight between Japan's Haneda Airport and Jakarta, with a stop in Bali, to begin in December but scrapped the plan due to omicron variant concerns. <br/>