The deadline for giving an offer for the three Olympic companies is over and the big news is that the most promising buyer Etihad Airways withdrew from the negotiations. As grreporter.info already told you, Olympic Airlines is divided into three companies – the flying Panteon operations, the technical support base, and the land customer service. The final deadline for giving an offer was 12:00am on January 30^th.

The vice-president of the UAE national airline Etihad Airways Ian Burns said for “Bloomberg” that the company is not participating in any consortium, which wants to buy Olympic. The airline, which has its headquarters in Abu Dhabi participated in the PCP Capital Partners consortium, which gave a preliminary offer for Panteon. This is the second big company, which withdraws from the privatization of the Greek national airline. Few months ago Qatar Airlines did the same, despite the special Kostas Karamanlis’ visit to Doha.

“The rumors of companies withdrawing from the tender for Olympic is not helping,” said the president of “Panteon” Giorgios Benopoulos. According to him the tender is a very important procedure for the airline’s future and people need to take it seriously. “Olympic’s privatization is happening at a moment of global financial crisis, which is already felt in the real economy. Let us wait for the procedure to finish before we categorize it as successful or not,” also said Benopoulos.