Aeroflot returned part of the advances for the supply of Airbus aircraft

Aeroflot managed to return part of the so-called pre-delivery payments (advance payments) for long-haul Airbus A350-900 aircraft, the company's CEO Sergei Aleksandrovsky said in an interview with RBC.

Back in 2007, the Russian airline signed a direct contract with Airbus for the supply of 22 such aircraft. There are currently only seven A350-900s in the company's fleet. “Under the current conditions, the continuation of deliveries is not possible,” Aleksandrovsky notes. He is referring to the sanctions on the supply of aircraft and spare parts to RUSSIA, which Western countries have introduced since the end of February 2022 after the start of a military special operation in Ukraine.

“Under the terms of these contracts, so-called pre-delivery payments are paid. And we have already returned part of the pre-delivery payments. Officially, to the settlement account of Aeroflot PJSC, in US dollars,” the top manager said, without specifying the amount of these payments. According to him, the management is "working" on the return of the remaining part of the payments and so far is achieving this in an extrajudicial plane.

And Aviacapital Service, the leasing subsidiary of the state corporation Rostec, which planned to supply Aeroflot with 17 more A350 aircraft (eight A350-900 and nine A350-1000), decided to recover an advance payment of $ 5.1 million from Airbus through the COURT. On December 13, she filed a lawsuit against the manufacturer in the Moscow Arbitration Court. “The lawsuit is based on the demand for the return of advance payments that were transferred to Airbus under a preliminary contract for the supply of A350 aircraft for Aeroflot,” a representative of the leasing company explained to Interfax. “Given that the sanctions made it impossible to fulfill this contract, many notifications were sent to Airbus asking for the return of advances, but to no avail. As a result, we are forced to go to court,” he added.

According to Aleksandrovsky, at the moment, the Aeroflot group (it includes the airline of the same name, Rossiya and Pobeda) has 357 aircraft, of which 13 foreign-made aircraft are “blocked outside the territory of Russia” (arrested at the request of lessors due to for Western sanctions). “At the same time, most of them were blocked during scheduled maintenance or international flights due to the closure of airspace,” he said.