New Delhi: A Parliamentary panel will hear on 8 August the views of various stakeholders on the disinvestment of national carrier Air India and Pawan Hans Ltd.

While a group of ministers, headed by finance minister Arun Jaitley, is looking into various aspects of the proposed disinvestment of Air India, the government has already decided to sell its entire 51% stake in Pawan Hans Ltd (PHL), in which the rest 49% holding is with ONGC.

Air India Chairman and Managing Director (CMD) has passed an order to recover unauthorised payments made to carrier’s employees. The order paves the way to recover money from the salary of carrier’s Chief Vigilance Officer (CVO), was has been charged of misusing her position and mistreating public fund. Ms. Shobha Ohatker, CVO of Air India, is facing charges of corruption against her. She has been accused of staying in hotels and flying to different destinations from the funds of Air India. Ohatker, an IPS officer from the batch of 1990, has been with Air India since 2015.

Four crew members of Air India were detained by the Saudi Arabia police last week as they could not show them the original copies of their passport.

According to an Air India pilot, crew members of all airlines are required to deposit their passports at the immigration office at Jeddah, which issues a certificate.

Body parts that could belong to passengers killed in one or other of two Air India plane crashes more than years ago have been found on Mont Blanc in the French Alps, sources said today.

Daniel Roche, who is fascinated by air plane accidents and has spent years combing the Bossons Glacier looking for remains, made the discovery yesterday.

KOLKATA: An unexplained glitch in Air India's reservation system that triggered angry protests among passengers in Kolkata this weekend has the airline's commercial team on tenterhooks.

On Saturday, 194 passengers reported for Air India flight AI 731 from Kolkata to Guwahati when the Airbus A 319 aircraft had only 144 seats. Some airlines do resort to overbooking but never at this scale. While the 50 stranded passengers fumed and fretted, AI officials were left flummoxed at how it had happened.

After Tata Group and IndiGo, Air India’s privatisation bid has received yet another boost as private equity players KKR and Co and Warbug Pincus have expressed interest in acquiring the national carrier’s businesses, reported Live Mint.

The two buyout firms separately sought details of the proposed privatisation process cleared by the Union Cabinet in June 2017, two people aware of the development said.

An internal committee of Air India is preparing a list of former employees who are suspected of siphoning-off artwork, an official with the airline said on Friday.

According to the official, who did not wished to be named, the airline will "not take any action if its artworks are returned", however an internal committee has started to prepare a list of missing artwork and suspected former employees who might have them in their possession.

Air India’s net loss after tax narrowed to Rs 3,643 crore and operating profit rose to Rs 300 crore in the last financial year, the government said today. The airline saw its total revenue, including exceptional and extraordinary items, increase to Rs 22,146 crore in 2016 -17 period, as per provisional numbers provided by Minister of State for Civil Aviation Jayant Sinha to the Rajya Sabha. The total revenue stood at Rs 20,524.56 crore in the year-ago period.

Air India is drawing up a proposal to offer voluntary buyouts to just over a third of its 40,000 employees, a senior company official said, one of the largest such offers in India's state sector, as the carrier slashes costs ahead of a 2018 sale.

The official, who could not be named as the plans are not public, said the state-owned airline had also put fleet expansion on hold, scrapping a proposal to lease eight Boeing 787 wide-body aircraft. Air India's board approved the proposal in April but nothing further had been done.

India is considering selling state-owned Air India in parts to make it attractive to potential buyers, as it reviews options to divest the loss-making flagship carrier, several government officials familiar with the situation said.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi's cabinet gave the go-ahead last month for the government to try to sell the airline, after successive governments spent billions of dollars in recent years to keep the airline going.

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