THE bosses at Khazanah Nasional Bhd have worked at an admirably fast pace to fill the leadership void left by the sudden departure of Peter Bellew as the CEO of MAS.
The fledgling national carrier, which has seen three CEOs in three years, has now turned to a homegrown talent, Captain Izham Ismail, who is the current MAS COO, to help steer the airline out of the rough weather.
MAS seldom finds itself not in the news. One day after Captain Izham was named as CEO-designate, MAS Flight MH1 en route to Kuala Lumpur had to make a turn back to London due to malfunctioning lavatories.
The Airbus A380 aircraft dumped fuel before landing safely at the airport. “No water in the lavatories on board the aircraft forced it to return to London,” according to one tweet.
Izham, with 38 years of experience in the airline industry, will have his hands full in driving the recovery plan set out by Khazanah, the sole shareholder of the carrier.
He will ensure the implementation of the initiatives under the plan is well on track to enable MAS to be profitable again by the second half of 2018 and the planned IPO in 2019.
This will also require the buy-in from all stakeholders, including its staff, a point that MAS chairman Tan Sri Md Nor Yusof had reiterated last week.
What Khazanah has done promptly is to put an end to any leadership vacuum and to ensure that the airline and its staff are focused on delivering what is required of them.
It is unfortunate that Bellew had pulled a surprise U-turn on the eve of Deepavali, abandoning MAS after just one year in office in order to “balik kampung” to perform national service by helping to run Ireland’s Ryanair.
What was more surprising was that MAS had to learn about Bellew’s departure from the Ryanair announcement to the London Stock Exchange. This must have caused deep embarrassment to his Malaysian employer.
Just a few weeks before that, Bellew insisted that he had no intention whatsoever of leaving MAS and Malaysia, describing Malaysia as “the most wonderful country” and that he was “perfectly happy” as chief of the airline.
By the way, Bellew was a big fan of the food at Ravi’s Banana Leaf Restaurant in Mont Kiara.
We do not know what transpired in the ensuing days and weeks that prompted Bellew to change his mind.
MAS suffered two devastating tragedies in 2014, involving flights MH370 and MH17.
The subsequent restructuring of MAS, which involved staff and route cutbacks, took a hit when it lost its first foreign CEO Christoph Mueller, who left in mid-2016 after just a year on the job.
Bellew, who was then MAS COO, replaced Mueller. He is now leaving MAS.
Some industry analysts said the frequent leadership changes at MAS do not bode well for the carrier.
“In our view the airline is beyond rehabilitation and saving until and unless certain hard-nosed decisions are made,” aviation and economics consultancy EndauAnalytics wrote in a report issued last week.
“Ironically, MAB (the MAS group) is in no better position today despite having been ‘transformed’ by Malaysia’s sovereign wealth fund, the airline’s owner. Is the sovereign wealth fund prescribing the wrong medication?” it said.
Captain Izham, who completed an Advanced Management Programme at Harvard Business School last year, is an industry veteran and has the confidence of the MAS board, which met on Friday, and Khazanah.
He will have to rely on his long experience at MAS to stabilise the operations, grow the revenue, manage costs and gradually turn it around.
There should also be a clear separation of powers between the MAS shareholder and the management in the interest of best corporate governance practices.
MAS board members should also carry out their role and responsibility more diligently. After all, boards govern while management manages.
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