Most of which would not have had the legal standing or ability to successfully block a merger in court. Very hard for states to file lawsuits alleging violation of federal anti trust laws and federal interstate commerce (airline) if the federal government agreed to the merger. Individual consumers and groups, even harder.

 

doubtful

What airline mergers have been stopped by a lawsuit not brought by the federal government?

who would have had standing to sue that would not have benefited from the merger?

who sued to stop AS/HA, or SY/G4, or any of the legacy behemoths?

the only people who wanted that merger to fail were the legacies and the Biden administration. And from what I could gather at the time, it was so they could set a precedent to use against big tech companies

 

The fact is that it was the previous administration who took time out of their busy day of going after parents who complain to their PTAs to take this to Federal Court where the judge had no choice to rule the way they did. That is the fact. I do not think the current administration would take this to court. As a matter of fact I know they won't.

 

As what happens with every merger in every business. So not an excuse at all.

 

Can someone explain why the extra "restricted cash", mandated by the December 2025 extension of the credit card processing agreement with US Bank, is suddenly gone?

Nov filing: 586 cash + 205 restricted cash
Dec filing: 272 cash + 591 restricted cash
Jan filing: 610 cash + 212 restricted cash
Feb filing: 560 cash + 219 restricted cash

It appears the company moved the restricted cash back to unrestricted cash again?

If US Bank still had their approximately 380 million restriction, cash on hand would be down to 180 million (minus losses for March and April).

This definitely changes how long the company will be able to operate.

No wonder US Bank want it liquidated.

 

The NEA was also undone, had it been this admin JetBlue would never had exited the NEO and the merger with Spirit would never have materialized.

So either way, no merger would've happened with Spirit and JetBlue. Who knows where'd they'd be now though.

 

I paraphrased your response as I'm just looking at the statute and who did what in the past isn't really relevant in this case.

Clayton Act specifically allows private parties to enforce and seek injunction to block a merger, so I bet AA/DL/UA would have sued if DOJ didn't.

In this case they didn't have to as litigation is expensive and DOJ did it for them, but they could have delayed it for a long time and I bet they had the appetite to do so.

 

Not an excuse, just an observation.
The person to blame is TC with his "Spirit has a path to profitability" BS, which is why the judge blocked the distressed carrier argument. We might be flying SpiritBlue right now if TC would have had the humility to say we are going to be out of business in a year if this does not go through.

 

The money being held by US Bank is not "restricted cash". its actually part of Spirit's "unrestricted cash". Its a GAAP nuance. Its Spirit's money, they just don't have possession of it. Its being held by US Bank. My guess is whoever did the December MOR screwed up and accounted for the US Bank holdback as "restricted" which means they are holding about $380M of Spirit's cash to pay back people that bought tickets in the event Spirit closes its doors.

The bad news is that Spirit looks to be burning $2M a day according to the February MOR and probably a lot more now because of fuel prices.

Spirit can't just burn down to $0 because of minimum liquidity covenants which are independent of restricted cash. Its highly likely that Spirit's unrestricted cash could be down to its "liquidity covenants" which is why all the talk about shutting down.

Another huge problem is that there are probably a large number of book-aways because of all the warnings of a shut down, so people are not booking on Spirit and its just going to accelerate.

 

B6 chose to abandon the NEA in order to pursue the NK merger. They could have appealed the decision along with AA.