Kenya Airways chief executive Sebastian Mikosz has said he will be resigning on 31 December, 2019. Mikosz says the resignation is due to personal grounds.
Here is the resignation note from Mikosz;
‘Dear KQ Family,
Given that we are a listed company we are subject to specific stock exchange regulations.
The information I am sharing with you here was already communicated to both the Capital Markets Authority (CMA) and the Nairobi Securities Exchange (NSE) as per the regulations.
Since started working as CEO at KQ, I have always tried to inform you about any management decisions before you learn it from the public domain. It is in line with this practice that I would like to take this first chance to inform you that I have made the decision to shorten my contract term and have decided to resign on personal grounds effective December the 31st of this year.
It is my personal decision and I have obviously discussed it with the Board as well as with my family. I believe that this
is the ideal timing to begin a transition process to find someone who will continue with the turnaround initiatives that we began 3 years ago.
Let me however be very specific that for the remaining 7 months as CEO I am fully determined to continue delivering the improvements that we have been executing together and that are showing visible results. I must point out that I am particularly proud of all of you as thanks to our collective efforts we’ve managed to bring the company from a historic loss in 2014 of Ksh 25bn and narrowed it down to Ksh 7.Sbn in just 4 years.
My clear intention is not to slow down for a single day, and we will continue this improvement trend as I am convinced that KQ is on a good path for a full recovery. You will notice the confirmation of this in the next few weeks through the announcements of some good news concerning our future developments.
Nevertheless, I am fully aware that some of you might be surprised. I am also aware that in the next few days this news will be in the public domain taken out of context with many rumours and comments, Please don’t pay attention to these and please remember that this kind of change is part of a normal company life. I am sure that in the next few weeks I am going to meet most of you on different occasions, and we can take time to discuss about it directly and openly, as always.
In the meantime, I am going be away travelling to China to work on the launch of our direct Beijing flight, I will also be attending IATA General Assembly as well as conducting a business review in Bangkok as previously scheduled.
Lastly let me use this opportunity to attach the presentation of our 2018 results that I shared during the last town hall meeting. I promised to do it for those who could not attend it.
I would like to insist again that 2018 was a good year for us and we have improved our results as presented in the attachment. I am determined to continue this improvement trend and be sure that we can do at least as good in 2019 as we did last year.
I wish you a very good weekend and see you onboard our planes this week!’
Mikosz leaves the troubled Airliner at a time when it is making huge back to back losses.