Airlink (South Africa) (4Z, Johannesburg O.R. Tambo) continues to bat off ongoing media speculation that it may be the southern African airline that Qatar Airways (QR, Doha Hamad International) is planning to invest in.

“Airlink is always exploring opportunities and is in conversations with several existing airline partners. However, we have not committed to any binding strategic equity investment in Airlink,” CEO and Managing Director Rodger Foster said in response to a Bloomberg report that Qatar Airways is in talks to buy a 20% stake in Airlink. The Financial Times reported that Qatar Airways was closing in on a deal to buy a stake in Airlink. “The two sides have held detailed talks about an investment from Qatar Airways […] although no final deal has yet been reached,” it claimed, citing “people familiar with the matter”.

This followed comments made by Qatar Airways Group CEO Badr Mohammed Al-Meer at the Farnborough Air Show on July 23 that a deal with a southern African airline was at an advanced stage. He did not name the airline involved, but media speculation turned to Airlink and South African Airways (SA, Johannesburg O.R. Tambo), which is again looking for a strategic investor.

Al-Meer said Southern Africa was the missing part in the carrier’s African network, following a partnership with Royal Air Maroc (AT, Casablanca Mohamed V) in North Africa and an impending 49% investment in East African carrier RwandAir (WB, Kigali).

Foster told ch-aviation that he was evaluating mergers and acquisitions as an option to meet narrowbody competition on domestic point-to-point routes and consolidate an overtraded South African market. He said Airlink maintained ongoing communication with its global partners and always explored opportunities for collaboration. “Some of them are candidates for possible closer cooperation,” he said. Apart from Qatar Airways, Airlink also codeshares and is a significant feeder to Qatar Airways’ competitor Emirates, a relationship that would play a role in any decision to be made. Other codeshare partners include United Airlines, Lufthansa, British Airways, and Swiss.

Earlier this month, Foster told ch-aviation he was awaiting the outcome of a challenge before South Africa’s International Air Services Council on ownership and control regulations, which currently limit foreign investment in South African carriers to 25%. Airlink and Lift Airlines (GE, Johannesburg O.R. Tambo) have raised questions in Pretoria about FlySafair‘s foreign ownership threshold.

A decision on the matter may be delayed by a backlog of work piling up at the domestic and international licensing bodies in Pretoria which are in a stand-off with the Department of Transport (DoT), which has halted payments to council members as it reviews their allowances, affecting the regulatory bodies’ ability to process applications, reports Independent Online (IOL). Both councils were reconstituted in March 2022 after a regulatory hiatus in overseeing the granting or revocation of traffic rights for South African airlines.