Four former South African Express (SAX) employees, trading as Fly Sax, who hope to buy what’s left of the defunct carrier, have until the end of this month to tie up a potential new investment deal.

Fly Sax said last week it had been left hanging when talks with Harith General Partners (the new shareholder in SAA if that deal goes ahead), and Siga Express went cold in March. Siga Express is now understood to be back at the table and wants a meeting.

Siga Express is a Siga Holdings brand and associated with Siga Capital. The group’s website describes Siga Express as “a black-women-owned company with a BBBEE Level 1 status and a focus on being an integrated public transport operator through partnerships, new contracting and acquisitions in the South African market”.

Just seven days before Fly Sax needs to confirm its intentions to SAX’s liquidators, Fly Sax spokesperson Thabsile Sikakane told Tourism Update: “There’s definitely hope for SAX to be resuscitated.” She said she expected a meeting would take place soon.

Fly Sax went public last week over its disappointment that its potential partners had “backtracked” on their “commitment”, which apparently reopened lines of communication.

Fly Sax has not advertised what sum it requires to satisfy SAX’s liquidators. However, a legal letter outlining the broad strokes of an agreement between Harith, Siga and Fly Sax showed a purchase price of R26m (€1.5m).

The former employees would be buying SAX in name only, as there were no tangible assets left to speak of, Sikakane said. Fly Sax expects that it would take six to 12 months to restart the business. “It is just the intangible assets, such as the airline’s licence and name, the intellectual property,” she said.

According to Sikakane, the new SAX will restart with domestic services first. Plans were fully dependent on securing enough financial backing to cover aircraft, staff and operational costs, she said. “We would start off very conservatively and move into the region as the industry reopens. For now, due to COVID-19, we are definitely just looking to start domestic flights.”

She said the liquidation process would resume mid-July if Fly Sax couldn’t meet its obligations. “We have not asked [the liquidators] for another extension. All we did say was, let’s wait it out. The end of June would be the decider.”