Monarch was an airline from an earlier era – but were its owners to blame for its demise?

Monarch Airlines was the ghost of an earlier age of holiday travel. When I used to see its planes lined up at Leeds-Bradford airport alongside those of Ryanair and its brash northern rival Jet2, I sometimes wondered why Monarch was still there. Now it has been brought down by a combination of the weak pound, too much competition on Iberian routes and too little demand for terrorist-threatened ones to Turkey, Tunisia and Egypt. Even the orderly repatriation of 110,000 Monarch passengers has had an old-fashioned feel to it (perhaps even a touch of Dunkirk, for those who have seen that excellent film), enhanced by the reassuring tones of Dame Deirdre Hutton, the veteran quango queen who chairs the Civil Aviation Authority.

Monarch’s demise reflects changing European aviation markets — in which two other carriers, Alitalia and Air Berlin, have gone bust this year — but I’m wondering how much it also has to do with changed ownership. The billionaire Swiss-Italian Mantegazza family who created Monarch in 1967 had evidently tired of injecting capital to modernise its fleet and become nervous of its £660 million pension fund shortfall. They sold it in 2014 to Greybull Capital, a Sloane Street-based private equity firm run by two French brothers, Marc and Nathaniel Meyohas, and a Swede, Richard Perlhagen, who invest their own families’ money.

Monarch staff took 30 per cent pay cuts and pilots had their pension rights slashed when the company scheme was transferred to the government’s Pension Protection Fund. But Greybull stepped up with an extra £165 million to renew the airline’s operating licence last year and is now thought to be in the hole for £250 million. Marc Meyohas has said that Greybull has ‘some expertise in turnaround and helping firms through choppy waters’. But how much? Another of its investments (among a portfolio of a dozen or so) was the My Local chain of convenience stores, spun out of Morrisons, which collapsed last year; a third, Rileys Sports Bars, has staggered from crisis to crisis.