Gidon Novick has walked away from the Takatso Consortium, the strategic equity partner of SAA.

This means that Global Aviation, together with the airline management company formed by Novick for the specific purpose – which together owned a minority share in the 51% black-owned Takatso consortium –  have exited the consortium. Global Aviation and Novick’s management team brought with them many years of aviation expertise.

Presumably, with the exit of Novick and Global Aviation, the deal now hangs in the balance.

This leaves Harith General Partners, a Pan-African infrastructure investor, the sole remaining member.

Novick’s chat with Tourism Update indicated that the reason for his exit was his dissatisfaction with a lack transparency and information-sharing at board level. “Transparency is critical in any business and it builds trust. Information-sharing is vital to the business.”

The Takatso Consortium was originally formed to buy a 51% controlling stake in the airline from the Department of Public Enterprise (DPE) for R3bn  (€176m) and was announced as the bid winner in June 2021, when it signed an MOU with the DPE.

For the past 18 months, movement towards closing the deal has been extraordinarily slow, the performance of due diligence cited as the reason for lack of progress.

Novick said he still believed this was an exciting time for the airline industry and one of great opportunity, including for SAA – he added that he was still willing to get involved in the revival of SAA.

Novick founded kulula.com, South Africa’s first low-cost carrier in 2001.