Brent Pin­heiro

brent.pin­heiro@guardian.com

Just sev­en months af­ter tak­ing up the top job at Caribbean Air­lines (CAL), Nir­mala Ra­mai has stepped down from her role as act­ing CEO. The move be­came ef­fec­tive on Mon­day (April 13th). Ac­cord­ing to the com­pa­ny, she will now fo­cus on "core op­er­a­tional pri­or­i­ties" in her sub­stan­tive role as Chief Op­er­at­ing Of­fi­cer.

Var­ma Khillawan, the com­pa­ny's vice pres­i­dent of Main­te­nance and En­gi­neer­ing, will now act as CEO for a pe­ri­od of three months while the air­line search­es for a per­ma­nent CEO. In an in­ter­nal memo seen by Guardian Me­dia, Khillawan's ap­point­ment as act­ing CEO be­came ef­fec­tive April 14th. Khillawan is a sea­soned air­line in­dus­try pro­fes­sion­al and has pre­vi­ous­ly act­ed as vice pres­i­dent of Hu­man Re­sources.

The po­si­tion of CEO was last held by Garvin Med­era, who de­part­ed the com­pa­ny last Oc­to­ber.

The move comes mere days af­ter CAL was re­as­signed from the Min­istry of Fi­nance to the Min­istry of Trans­port and Civ­il Avi­a­tion, mak­ing Min­is­ter Eli Za­k­our its new line min­is­ter.

Za­k­our met with some of CAL’s board mem­bers on Tues­day.

In a brief What­sApp mes­sage to Guardian Me­dia ear­li­er this week, Za­k­our said, "My pri­or­i­ty is to ad­dress the air­line’s fi­nan­cial chal­lenges, strength­en op­er­a­tional ef­fi­cien­cy, and im­prove ser­vice de­liv­ery to the trav­el­ling pub­lic, while strength­en­ing the air­line’s role in na­tion­al, re­gion­al, and in­ter­na­tion­al con­nec­tiv­i­ty."

He is ex­pect­ed to vis­it the com­pa­ny's head­quar­ters to­day.