Today, the staff accused the airline’s co-founder and chief executive, Ravi Alagendrran, of already wanting to fire them.
Zulkalnain Azdan, a member of the airline’s operations division, also accused Ravi of intentionally not paying the staff’s salaries and not making Employees Provident Fund contributions
“He didn’t want to pay us intentionally. He only agreed to pay us after we brought the issue to the media,” Zulkalnain told FMT.
Ravi had said in a report published by Star Online earlier that Zulkalnain had been originally hired as a cleaner for his planes, and that Ravi had been forced by the staff to promote Zulkalnain to station manager over racial matters.
Zulkalnain denied this, saying that he was only “helping out” as a plane cleaner when one of the staff had passed away. “I was only covering for someone else who had passed away.”
He pointed out that he was supposed to be the station manager at KLIA2 from the time Rayani Air was planned.
“Before this I was the station manager for Malindo Air in KLIA, Malacca and Alor Setar. Syazwan, who was KLIA2’s station manager resigned. As they promised, the position was supposed to be mine to begin with. I gave the plane cleaner position to someone else I have trained,” Zulkalnain said.
Ravi has promised to pay the staff’s arrears in salary once investors had bought over a 51 percent share in the airline, which he co-founded with his wife. The troubled airline was suspended for three months from April 11 after it halted operations without approval of aviation authorities.
The airline has been warned that it could lose its operations certificate if it could not convince the Civil Aviation Authority of its ability to resume operations.
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