Irish unit of BOC Aviation records $243m profit after nine-figure insurance payout over detained Russian aircraft
The $158m paid out in insurance payouts last year followed $258m paid out in 2023 under the same heading.
Total revenues and other income decreased by 7pc to $660.4m in 2024 from $710.6m in 2023.
The 2024 revenues included lease revenues of $374.25m.
The directors said the decline is mainly due to lower insurance settlements in respect of aircraft owned by the company and formerly leased to Russian airlines which were detained in Russia.
'The company is continuing to pursue insurance claims in respect of aircraft currently or formerly detained in Russia,' the directors added.
The firm saw a return to growth across the industry with traffic recovering in 2024 to near-2019 levels.
The Irish unit is a wholly owned subsidiary of BOC Aviation Limited, which is a public company incorporated in Singapore and listed on the Hong Kong stock exchange.
The insurance settlement concerning the 15 aircraft coincided with the company's professional fee costs increasing by 59pc, from $7.98m to $12.69m.
At the end of last December, the company had a total of 111 owned and 31 managed aircraft.
ADVERTISEMENT
The company recorded a post-tax profit of $206.7m after incurring a corporation tax charge of $36.6m.
The pre-tax profit takes account of non-cash depreciation costs of $166.24m and finance costs of $181.3m.
The firm last year recorded profits of $22.4m from $211.92m realised from the sale of aircraft.
The firm employs 11 people in Ireland and staff costs last year increased by 69pc from $3.16m to $5.33m.
Directors' pay last year totalled $963,000, which included emoluments of $731,000.
The firm's cash funds last year increased from $119.65m to $151.16m. The business paid out no dividend last year.
The directors said total assets were stable year-on-year, at $5.39bn at December 31, 2024, compared with $5.38bn a year earlier.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Irish Times
an hour ago
- Irish Times
The Colonialist: Gruelling but impressive portrait of the virulent racist who bankrolled Parnell
The Colonialist: The Vision of Cecil Rhodes Author : William Kelleher Storey ISBN-13 : 978-0199811359 Publisher : Oxford University Press Guideline Price : £30.99 Cecil Rhodes never got around to visiting Ireland . The Englishman, whose name has become a byword for British imperialism, however, was also an enthusiastic supporter of Irish Home Rule. In 1888 the Africa-based mining magnate met Charles Stewart Parnell , was greatly impressed and sent him a donation of £10,000 (worth almost €1 million today). The money came with just one condition – Parnell had to alter his Home Rule policy so that some Irish MPs would remain at Westminster even after a parliament was established in Dublin. As William Kelleher Storey points out in this sober, heavyweight and quietly damning biography, Rhodes's generosity towards Ireland was not so surprising as it might first appear. Along with painting the world map red, he dreamed of creating a giant federal parliament in London with representation from every British colony. Ireland should be 'a stalking horse', he wrote to Parnell, and 'the stepping-stone to that federation, which is the condition of the continued existence of our empire'. Explaining this vision is a key theme of Storey's book, the first womb-to-tomb Rhodes biography for almost 40 years. During that time its subject has been increasingly denounced as a greedy plunderer, a white supremacist and an architect of South African apartheid. The international Rhodes Must Fall movement is still campaigning to topple statues of him at university campuses he once helped fund. While The Colonialist is anything but a whitewash, it does not shy away from an inconvenient truth. In Rhodes's own twisted way, he was also an idealist – and Storey argues vigorously that his record must be contextualised as well as condemned. If Rhodes was your specialist subject on Mastermind, this book would supply the answer to every conceivable question. In painstakingly researched detail, it recounts how the sickly son of a Hertfordshire vicar was sent out to his brother's Natalian cotton farm, built the De Beers diamond company into a massively profitable monopoly and wound up as prime minister of the Cape Colony. It chronicles his lifelong quest to unite southern Africa's four colonies into one self-governing state, spreading white settlements while exploiting the region's natural resources. A history professor at Millsaps College in Mississippi, Storey has a keen eye for anecdotes that illustrate Rhodes's distinctly odd personality. Young Cecil's nanny sometimes found the boy hidden away and moaning pitifully, unable to tell her why. Even after becoming fantastically wealthy, he valued power over possessions and usually dressed in rough workingman's clothes. He seems to have had a self-destructive streak, regularly consuming large amounts of rich food, cigars and alcohol, including a champagne and Guinness cocktail at lunchtime. 'I hear you are a woman hater,' Queen Victoria remarked to him over dinner, presumably because he never showed any interest in them. He gallantly replied: 'How could I dislike a sex to which your majesty belongs?' While Rhodes was not without charm or charisma, Storey accuses him of being far more devious than his upright image suggested. In one notorious episode, he effectively tricked the illiterate King Lobengula into signing a document that gave away gold mining rights across Matabeleland and other territories. When talking failed, Rhodes turned to guns and sanctioned a raid on the Transvaal's Boer republic that he hoped would spark a British uprising in 1895. Its failure permanently dented his reputation and he died just over six years later, aged 48. Above all, Storey leaves readers in no doubt that Rhodes was a virulent racist even by 19th-century standards. 'The natives are children … just emerging from barbarism,' he declared in a parliamentary speech described by the author as 'dripping with dismissive contempt'. He systematically deprived black people of land, finance and voting rights, telling a police officer during a rebellion: 'You should kill all you can … it serves a lesson to them when they talk things over their fires at night.' Rhodes has already inspired more than two dozen biographies, but Storey claims to go further than any of them by exploring his impact on southern Africa's physical landscape. There are many self-contained sections about how he changed its agriculture, railways, telecommunications, urban development and diamond production. Some of this is not for the squeamish, particularly an account of the grisly methods used by mine bosses to make sure workers were not smuggling precious stones in their bodies. It all adds up to a rich and panoramic narrative, so wide-ranging that The Life and Times of Cecil Rhodes might have been a better title. Charles Stewart Parnell predicted that the man who was bankrolling his party 'would not live in history'. On this, at least, the 'uncrowned king of Ireland' was dead wrong. 'It will be much easier to remove a few statues than to reverse the legacy of Cecil Rhodes,' Storey warns at the conclusion of his often gruelling but always impressive portrait. 'Understanding what he did is a first step to freedom.'
Irish Examiner
4 hours ago
- Irish Examiner
From boycotts to barcodes: How supermarket choices still shape the world
Collective action in the supermarket can influence world events. Dunnes Stores workers boycotted South African oranges in the 1970s. The strike made international headlines and led the Irish government to ban fruit and vegetables from South Africa. Prior to the strike the workers had known little about South Africa, but were persuaded by Nimrod Sejake, a trade unionist from South Africa exiled in Ireland, that South Africa was like a pint of Guinness: A small number of whites at the top and all the black people underneath. People can now take collective action by using apps. Scan a barcode and the app may tell you whether the product you want to buy has been ethically produced. I was recently made aware of a missed scan or misinformation on one of these boycott apps. That gave rise to a question about the country of origin of a citrus fruit and the information contained on the label. It's remarkable how much information can be derived from a small tag or label attached to a net of oranges, and I'm going to use oranges as an example. The shopper had scanned the label on a net of oranges in to an app, which read the label and reported that it was an unrelated product, a bar of chocolate. Because the bar code didn't match the product that had been scanned, the shopper felt there was something nefarious about the oranges, which were labelled as Egyptian. There are two questions: Do the boycott apps work, and can we rely upon the labels in the supermarket? Boycott apps scan a product's bar code and identify the brand, manufacturer, or parent company. Based on this, they tell you whether the product aligns with or violates ethical, political, or environmental criteria. Most of these apps do not have access to a full bar code registry, so they rely on crowdsourcing databases, open-product databases, and public company information. Larger organisations and companies are easier to track than others, particularly when the bar codes are common internationally. For example, a can of popular cola has the same bar code no matter the country. Products that are produced and manufactured specifically for a supermarket are more difficult to track. Some retailers use brand-specific bar codes that only work in their own shop environments and do not transfer elsewhere. I visited five supermarkets belonging to the pillar retail brands in Ireland and examined each individual bar code on citrus fruit. That shopper was right: One specific net of oranges scans as a bar of chocolate from a competitor. However, of all the citrus fruit labels that I examined more than 50% are not contained within the boycott app that the consumer used. Remember, the apps rely on shoppers to upload this data to inform others. What about those labels that say that the product has come from Egypt? I visited many Irish supermarkets and examined more labels on oranges, lemons, and limes than I care to count, and one thing became apparent: All citruses sold in Ireland are clearly labelled with the country of origin. It's actually unsurprising that some of the oranges on our shelves come from Egypt, the fifth-largest producer of citrus fruit in the world and the largest in proximity to Europe — it produces more than Spain. Under EU regulations (No 1169/2011) the country of origin must be placed clearly on the product label. All the labels I examined stated where these citrus fruits had originated, whether it was Egypt or Spain, or beyond Europe and her neighbours, or as far afield as Argentina and Costa Rica. Also, did you know that any treatments applied to your fruit before it makes it to the supermarket shelves are now clearly disclosed on the labels? If you have looked closely at the labels on fruit lately you may have noticed some terms that may not be familiar to you. Thiabendazole, Pyrimethanil, and Imazalil are all fungicides and applied as a dip or a spray after harvest to reduce the growth of mould. You'd be familiar with this mould if you picked up an orange that may have sat in the fruit basket for too long and saw it had developed a green or blue mould and was exceedingly squishy. These fungicides are designed to keep your fruit fresher for longer and are highly regulated by the EU. The final treatment that you may see listed on the label is E904 — commonly known as shellac. Shellac is often used to glaze apples and citrus fruits to give them a shiny appearance and can extend shelf life. Any fruits that have been treated with this glaze are unsuitable for vegans, as shellac is a natural resin secreted by the lac insect. Vegan or not, we should all be washing our fruits before eating or even juicing them. BOYCOTT APPS Boycat and 'No Thanks' [ are the names of two ethical trading apps which many Irish consumers are using to check food producers to see if they are on a boycott list. An organisation may be placed onto a boycott list for being based in a particular country, but also having dubious equality or sustainability credentials. These apps enable consumers to make an informed choice when doing the shopping. Always read the label — and approach the retailer if you have any queries on provenance. If you believe that a retailer or trader has breached consumer law, you can always report your concerns to the CCPC by phoning their National Consumer Helpline on 01 402 5555 or emailing ask@ Read More Remember when a minister held Guinness 'hostage'? And other Irish food stories
RTÉ News
5 hours ago
- RTÉ News
Tariffs aren't good news but it could have been much worse
While the crucial US EU trade deal announced this weekend does bring certainty for businesses, there are significant drawbacks. Fundamentally, tariffs are negative for trade. The US is a significant export market for Ireland, and many sectors now face duties of 15% which did not exist last year. The biggest issue is pharmaceuticals, which are the largest Irish export to the US, valued at €44bn in 2024. In recent months US President Donald Trump had threatened enormous duties on drugs imported by America. He had ordered a national security investigation of the pharmaceutical sector. Last night, Tánaiste Simon Harris said his understanding was that after the investigation concludes the maximum tariff which could be imposed would be 15%. So, while the threat of more damaging duties is averted, pharmaceuticals made in Ireland may well face 15% tariffs in future, up from zero at present. Another key sector for Ireland is the manufacture of computer chips. Like pharmaceuticals it has been subject to a separate investigation by the Trump administration and faced the possibility of punitive tariffs, but it too could face a 15% tariff after the investigation ends. Last night, European Commission President Ursula Von Der Leyen said there was no decision yet regarding spirits exported to the US. This is critically important to Ireland's whiskey industry which has already seen several recent closures. There had been speculation that sector could have been part of a zero-for-zero tariff arrangement, but that is not yet agreed. Another important area for Ireland is aircraft leasing. Ms Von Der Leyen said last night that aviation would be part of a tariff-free arrangement. For other EU countries the massive duty of 27.5% which was imposed on European cars now falls to 15%. Some existing tariffs will be folded into that baseline 15%, meaning it would be an all-in tariff. For example, it is expected to include the existing "most favoured nation" duties of 4.8% which exist currently under World Trade Organization rules. The fact there is a deal at all avoids the threat of a prolonged tit-for-tat trade war. It means businesses can plan, investments can be made, and job-creating projects can proceed. But exporters are already seeking Government support as they navigate the new reality of the Trump administration's tariffs. The EU-US agreement is not a trade deal in the usual sense. Normally these pacts are negotiated over years and culminate in a document running to hundreds of pages. What was announced yesterday was the framework of a deal with much detail yet to be finalised. Yesterday wasn't the end of the negotiations, but it was a milestone.
