Emirates President Rebuts Resignation Claims

Emirates President and CEO Tim Clark is confident that ongoing US subsidy allegations will be disproved – and he will keep his job.

Speaking in Washington on Tuesday, he said discussions with US authorities had been “very constructive” without giving further details.

“I won’t have to resign because the allegations are incorrect, and we will show them to be incorrect – so let’s park that. I stand by everything I have said and let’s just get through to the flesh of what we have to do, and we’ll show you. When we have finished the job, you will see that we haven’t been subsidised in any shape or form.”

Asked if the airline would embark on legal action, Clark said the most important thing “is to get the job done with regard to the rebuttal of the report – what happens after that, let’s deal with that later.”

“But I’m quite sure that when we have put on the table in front of the stakeholders of the US government, what they need to know, they will be satisfied that there is no such subsidies and we’ll take it on from there,” he said.

Clark said Emirates has 20 US destinations on its radar and despite all the ongoing furore with subsidies, “we intend to progess with that”.

The Emirates President gave an assured half-hour presentation but occasionally expressed frustration.

“I struggle with this altogether,” he said. “We already feed traffic to the US ‘big three’ and have good commercial relationships with JetBlue.”