Caribbean Airlines names acting CEO

Brent Pin­heiro

brent.pin­[email protected]

Just sev­en months af­ter tak­ing up the top job at Caribbean Air­lines, Nir­mala Ra­mai’s tenure as act­ing CEO end­ed on April 13. Var­ma Khillawan, the com­pa­ny’s Vice Pres­i­dent of Main­te­nance and En­gi­neer­ing, will step in­to the role for three months.

Ac­cord­ing to an in­ter­nal memo seen by Guardian Me­dia, Khillawan’s ap­point­ment as act­ing CEO took ef­fect on April 14. Khillawan is a sea­soned air­line in­dus­try pro­fes­sion­al and has pre­vi­ous­ly served as Vice Pres­i­dent of Hu­man Re­sources. It was not im­me­di­ate­ly clear whether Ra­mai will re­turn to her du­ties as Chief Op­er­at­ing Of­fi­cer. The po­si­tion of CEO was last held by Garvin Med­era, who de­part­ed the com­pa­ny last Oc­to­ber.

The move comes days af­ter Caribbean Air­lines was re­as­signed from the Min­istry of Fi­nance to the Min­istry of Trans­port and Civ­il Avi­a­tion, mak­ing the Min­istry of Trans­port and Civ­il Avi­a­tion its line min­istry. Min­is­ter Eli Za­k­our now has re­spon­si­bil­i­ty for the air­line. He met with some of Caribbean Air­lines’ board mem­bers on April 14.

In a brief What­sApp mes­sage to Guardian Me­dia ear­li­er this week, Za­k­our said, “My pri­or­i­ty is to ad­dress the air­line’s fi­nan­cial chal­lenges, strength­en op­er­a­tional ef­fi­cien­cy, and im­prove ser­vice de­liv­ery to the trav­el­ling pub­lic, while strength­en­ing the air­line’s role in na­tion­al, re­gion­al, and in­ter­na­tion­al con­nec­tiv­i­ty.”

He is ex­pect­ed to vis­it the com­pa­ny’s head­quar­ters to­day.