State-owned national flagship South African Airways (SAA) announced on Friday that it had suspended its chief commercial officer, Sylvain Bosc. This followed a forensic investigation, itself triggered by a tip-off. The focus of the investigation was SAA’s route between Johannesburg and Abu Dhabi, which was inaugurated in late March.

The informant told the Deloittes Tip Offs hotline that “Sylvain doctored the numbers for Abu Dhabi to favour the opening of this route and sold SAA out. He knowingly misrepresented the board by overestimating the figures without substantiation and ignored network specialist advice.”

The subsequent investigation, by ENSafrica, established that Bosc had approved a business case (to which he had contributed) for a route between Johannesburg and Abu Dhabi, and had presented it to SAA’s board of directors for approval. The new route was portrayed as a gateway to China and India and one that would be highly profitable. The airline’s direct routes to these two countries had been costing it losses of more than R400-million a year.

But a code share agreement between SAA and Etihad Airways, initiated in the 2013/2014 financial year (and still in force) showed that passenger fares from the Abu Dhabi route would be significantly lower than the estimates given to the board and to the Minister of Public Enterprises by Bosc. In its press statement, the airline reported that Bosc ignored a previous warning by a former SAA international network planner that the fare price Bosc had used in his calculations was not achievable and that the result would be further losses for the airline.

“Mr Bosc elected to ignore that advice, which subsequently was proven to be correct and the selection of the Abu Dhabi network resulted in substantial continuous losses to SAA,” said the airline in its statement. “The submission to the Board by Mr Bosc amounted to an overestimation of the projected revenue figures and ignored network specialist advice who had advised that the Abu Dhabi route would run at a substantial loss.”