Roskosmos sold its airline to the Ministry of Defense for 1 ruble

State Corporation Roskosmos ceded control over 74% in its subsidiary airline Kosmos to a special flight detachment of the Ministry of Defense for 1 ruble. About it informed RBC with reference to the general director of the carrier Andrey Pankratov. The same information was confirmed by the press service of the Ministry of Defense.

It is specified that a quarter of Cosmos remained in the management of the state corporation. At the same time, the Ministry of Defense received all the debts of the airline, their amount was not reported, Pankratov said. According to SPARK, the total net loss of the airline in 2017-2021 amounted to 676 million rubles.

The state corporation noted that the deal was closed in the first half of 2022, when Dmitry Rogozin was still the head of Roscosmos (now the state corporation is headed by former Deputy Prime Minister Yuri Borisov).

The need to sell the airline was associated with a decrease in the carrier’s load on the part of industry enterprises due to “foreign economic factors”. Roskosmos stressed that the transfer of the airline under the control of the Ministry of Defense will allow updating the fleet, which, according to the Federal Air Transport Agency at the end of September, consisted of three aircraft: one Tu-134 and two Yak-42s.

According to Pankratov, next year the fleet will be replenished with five passenger Tu-204/214s and two cargo Il-76s from the secondary market. In particular, Red Wings aircraft and the Dalavia carrier, which went bankrupt in 2008, can be used for these purposes, sources told the publication. As a result, thanks to the new passenger aircraft, Cosmos will continue passenger transportation in the Arctic, including from Arkhangelsk to the Novaya Zemlya archipelago, and cargo Il-76 will be in demand by the Ministry of Defense due to the increased need for cargo transportation.

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