Hermes Airlines cancels contract with BWA, will the Prosecutor's Office get involved?

According to previous announcements, the company Bosnian Wand Airlines was supposed to start regular flights on February 20, however, all flights have been canceled until further notice, reports the Patria news agency.

All our earlier reports about how something was amiss in the new company, which is actually not an airline even though it presented itself as such, have been confirmed by the latest letter from the State Agency for Civil Aviation (BHDCA), which today confirmed to Patria that BWA had not submitted a request for issuing an Air Operator Certificate (AOC) to the Bosnia and Herzegovina Directorate of Civil Aviation (BHDCA), and therefore could not even begin the certification process, i.e., the procedure for examining whether conditions for issuing an AOC have been met.

- BHDCA suspended at the end of January all previously approved flights for the company Hermes Airlines, which were advertised in the media as flights of the company BWA, and in the meantime Hermes Airlines informed us that it had terminated the contract with BWA – says Aleksandar Lalović, spokesperson for BHDCA.

BHDCA only accepted the Statement of Intent that BWA submitted at the end of 2014, and informed BWA representatives about the regulatory requirements and standards applied by BHDCA in the certification process, i.e., issuing an AOC, as well as the necessary documents they need to submit along with the Request for issuing an AOC in order for that process to begin.

- From the above, it is evident that BWA is not an operator, i.e., an airline, since it does not possess an AOC, nor has the certification process even been initiated, and therefore it could not cancel flights for which it had no approval – explained Lalović.

Now the question arises whether the Prosecutor's Office of Bosnia and Herzegovina will get involved in this case and launch an investigation into how and in what manner BWA was founded and what the ultimate goal was.