Stelios urges Easyjet to fire staff and stop buying planes

EASYJET’S founder urged the airline to slash costs by cancelling orders for planes and sacking staff during the coronavirus outbreak.

Just days after the company paid him a £60m dividend, Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou (pictured) said its multi-billion pound order for new planes was the real ‘elephant in the room’.

He said this posed the biggest threat to the budget airline’s future and called for plans to expand its fleet to be scrapped.

Easyjet is seeking a government-backed loan to help it survive the coronavirus crisis.

The company, along with rivals such as British Airways and Virgin Atlantic, has been forced to ground planes because of the pandemic, while travel restrictions mean it has little revenue coming in.

But despite its request for taxpayer help, Easyjet pressed ahead with a £174m payout to shareholders on Friday, with one third of the cash going to Stelios. A spokesman for the Cypriot tycoon, who founded the firm in 1995 and still owns 33pc of it with his family, declined to comment on the dividend yesterday. He instead claimed that a £1.35bn payment which the company is due to hand Airbus this year for aircraft was ‘by far and away the largest threat to Easyjet’s future viability’. His spokesman said: ‘For the company to survive, it needs to cancel the current contract with Airbus citing “force majeure” and aim to run an Easyjet fleet of 250 aircraft, rather than the current 350.’ This should be followed by an ‘associated reduction in crewing numbers’. An Easyjet spokesman said: ‘Easyjet is taking every action to remove cost and non-critical expenditure from the business.’ BoSSES at low-cost central and Eastern European airline Wizz Air will forego their salaries for five weeks.