PRESS CONTACT: Hannah Lawrence, press@stay-grounded.org , (+43) 0670 550 09 34 A week of protest across Europe is taking aim at airline advertising and sponsorships over their role in increasing demand for flying. New statistics for 6 major airlines show that every €1...
Who Greases the Wheels of Deportation Flights?
Here we present a summary of Corporate Watch’s original post from 06 Jan 2023:
Air Partner and Carlson Wagonlit are the grease spinning the wheels of the UK deportation machine through the Home Office and have been organising logistics for mass-deportation flights for years. The Home Office is the UK’s “lead government department for immigration and passports, drugs policy, crime, fire, counter-terrorism and police.” International travel megacorp Carlson Wagonlit Travel (CWT) holds a £5.7 million, seven-year contract with the Home Office for the “provision of travel services for immigration purposes”, as it has done for nearly two decades. A key part of its work – the chartering of aircraft and crew to carry out the deportations – has been subcontracted to a little-known aviation charter outfit called Air Partner.
Air Partner: Home office deportation broker
When the UK’s Home Office wants to carry out a mass deportation flight, the task of finding the airline is delegated to Air Partner. Meanwhile, Carlson Wagonlit books the tickets, oversees the overall operation, arranges deportations on scheduled flights, and liaises with the guards who physically enforce the expulsions.
Flying for Frontex
Yet Air Partner isn’t just the UK government’s deportation dealer. Its Austrian branch is currently one of four companies which organise mass expulsions for the European Coast Guard and Border Agency, Frontex, in a €15 million framework contract that was renewed in August 2022.
Frontex organises deportation charter flights – either for multiple EU states at a time (where the plane stops to pick up deportees from several countries) – or for a single state. The Agency also arranges for individuals to be deported on regular commercial flights.
Air Partner’s work for Frontex is very similar to its work for the Home Office. It sources willing aircraft and crew, obtains flight and landing permits, and organises hotels – presumably for personnel – “in case of delays”.
Air Partner has been hired by dozens of governments and royal families worldwide and has done considerable work for Ireland, Austria, Germany, France and the United States. For example, between August 2021 and February 2022, the Austrian government awarded the company six Frontex-funded deportation contracts, worth an estimated average of €33,796.
In the first half of 2021, 22 of the EU’s 27 member states participated in Frontex flights, with Germany making far greater use of the ‘service’ than any other country. Air Partner enjoys its status as a privileged gatekeeper to Europe’s lucrative ‘deportation market’, and ultimately, the golden land of government contracts more generally.
In cahoots with the military & the wealthy
Air Partner was founded in 1961 with its origins in military work. Up until 2010, military contracts represented over 60% of pre-tax profits. It has also cashed in off of one crisis after the next from the War on Terror, to the Arab Spring and most recently from Covid-19. The company is also complicit in the creation of refugees, large numbers of whom Air Partner would later deport back to those war zones. It feeds war with invading armies, then feasts on its casualties.
The company reportedly carried at least 4,000t of military supplies during the first Gulf War. The chairman at the time, Tony Mack, said:
The Gulf War was a windfall for us. We’d hate to say ‘yippee, we’re going to war’, but I guess the net effect would be positive.6
9/11 and the subsequent War on Terror was a game changer for the company, marking a departure from reliance on corporate customers and a shift to more secure government work. First – as with the pandemic – there was a boom in private jet hire due to “the number of rich clients who are reluctant to travel on scheduled services”.7
It obtained significant the military contracts during the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. During the occupation of Afghanistan, it “did a lot of freighting for the military”,8 while later benefiting from emergency evacuation work when coalition foreign policy came to its inevitably grim conclusion in 2021.
Another financial highlight for the company was the 2011 Arab Spring, which contributed to a 93% increase in pre-tax profits. As people in Libya, Egypt, Bahrain and Tunisia took to the streets against their dictators, the company carried out emergency evacuations, including for “some of the largest oil companies”. A year later, it described a “new revenue stream from the oil & gas industry”, perhaps a bonus product of the evacuation work.
Finally, its largest jump in profits was seen in 2021, as it reaped the benefits of converging crises: the pandemic, the evacuation of Afghanistan, and the supply chain crisis caused by Brexit and the severe congestion of global sea-shipping routes.
Besides governments and wealthy individuals, its current client base includes “corporates, sports and entertainment teams, industrial and manufacturing customers, and tour operators”. Air Partner regularly serves the Wales football team, Manchester City, Manchester United, Chelsea and Real Madrid. It also flew teams and fans to the controversial 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar.5
Conclusion
What is really the difference between the people smugglers vilified daily by right-wing rags, and deportation merchants like Air Partner? True, Air Partner helps cast humans away in the opposite direction, often to places of danger rather than potential safety. And true, smugglers’ journeys are generally more consensual, with migrants themselves often hiring their fixers. But for a huge fee, people smugglers and deportation profiteers alike ignore the risks and indignities involved, as human cargo is shunted around in the perverse market of immigration controls. Instead of becoming accustomed to a dystopian reality, let’s be spurred on by the campaign’s success to put an end to this cruel industry in its entirety.
Photos: 1: 2021 deportation on a Privilege Style flight from Germany, Michael Trammer 2: Corporate Watch
Footnotes
1 Aldrick, Philip. “Worth teaming up with Air Partner”. The Daily Telegraph, October 07, 2004.
2 “Air Partner makes progress in the face of some strong headwinds”. Proactive Investors UK, August 27, 2021.
3 Aldrick, Philip. “Worth teaming up with Air Partner”. The Daily Telegraph, October 07, 2004.
4 Lea, Robert. “Mark Briffa has a new partner in aircraft chartering and isn’t about to fly away”. The Times, April 29, 2022
5 Ibid.
6 “AirPartner predicts rise in demand if Gulf war begins”. Flight International, January 14 2003.
7 “Celebrity status boosts Air Partner”. Yorkshire Post, October 10, 2002.
8 Baker, Martin. “The coy royal pilot”. The Sunday Telegraph, April 11, 2004.
9 Hancock, Ciaran. “Air Partner”. Sunday Times, April 10, 2005.
10 Saker-Clark, Henry. “Repatriation and PPE flights boost Air Partner”. The Herald, May 6, 2020.