Fury over Adria Tehnika sale

Thursday, December 3, 2015

Employees of the aircraft maintenance firm Adria Tehnika have challenged the company's recent sale to Poland's Linetech Holding, arguing that their efforts to carry out an employee buyout had not been treated equally by the Slovenian Sovereign Holding (SSH), which oversaw the sales process. "We believe there have been violations. We will examine the possibility for a review of the procedure. We will fight", the head of the ZSSS trade union confederation, Dušan Semolič, said. Union representative, Matej Jemec, says last week's sale to Linetech came "out of the blue". The company's workers had made an offer and founded a buyout vehicle, with Mr Jemec claiming they were not given a chance to raise their bid, in what he said was an "inadmissible and systematic exclusion of workers" from the sales procedure. The union claims the SSH engaged in "grave violations" of the act on the participation of workers in corporate governance, and violated the provisions of the state asset management strategy which notes that employee buyouts should be encouraged. The 100% stake in the company was unofficially sold for around five million euros, some two million euros of which came in purchase money and the rest in the form of a loan repayment to the two former shareholders - the SSH and Ljubljana Airport.