In roughly 2.5 months (31 Oct)....BER, the new Berlin Airport....will open.
Yeah, we can admit that it's around nine years past the planned opening date, and it's had tons of problems to correct. But they say the problems are now finalized.
So this week, I noticed via RBB (Berlin's public TV network) that BER has a new 'problem'.
There was a presentation to the 'Senate Committee' for the city (they are the owners, it's not a private enterprise like Frankfurt's Airport).....which didn't go well.
An audit was completed by a private company. Basically, the audit folks say this is a disaster now with profit non-existent (mostly because of low travel numbers caused by the Covid-19 virus).
The Airport management folks say no....there's no problem because they set higher fees into place.
The fees collected for restaurants, bars, parking at the Airport? Well....that got brought up too. If lesser traveler numbers occur.....who'd be using the bars or restaurants?
Where does this all lead to? The bonds for the Airport are probably going to be junk-level unless something occurs to pump up the traveler numbers.
What's funny here.....all this time 2011 to 2019....that they could have been open and making real money in a non-Covid-19 era, and they delayed this long enough to be seriously affected and the city could be looking at serious losses because of the way the Airport was financed.
Speculation? At some point in January with two months of income to show....my guess is that the political folks will meet and start to ask serious questions about the financial aspects and how this can be resolved.
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