Months of turmoil within the management ranks of Airbus reached a climax Thursday with an announcement by the company’s board of directors that Tom Enders will not seek another term as CEO beyond his current mandate of April 2019 and Fabrice Bregier would step down as COO and president of Airbus Commercial Aircraft in February. The company has chosen current Airbus Helicopters CEO Guillaume Faury, 49, to succeed Bregier.
The announcement comes amid an ongoing series of corruption investigations into Airbus civil and military dealings in several countries, one of which resulted in a November raid of one of the company’s offices outside Paris by French authorities in connection with a 2010 satellite sale to Kazakhstan.
Enders, 59, told the board he did not wish to seek another term beyond the company’s April 2019 shareholders’ meeting, while Bregier, 56, said he did not want to participate in the selection process for a successor chief executive and would instead pursue other interests.
“I understand Fabrice’s decision and his motives and, frankly, I would not have done differently,” said Enders in a written statement. “Many of the achievements this company can be proud of over the past decade were led by Fabrice and me, together. Airbus is deeply grateful for his outstanding contribution to the operational excellence and competitiveness of our business.”
As for the decision over his own future, Enders reflected on his 14 years as head of Airbus and EADS as “a long and exciting journey,” but one that has run its course.
“We need fresh minds for the 2020s,” he said. “In the coming 16 months, I will work with the board to ensure a smooth transition to the next CEO and a new generation of leaders; I will focus on our business challenges; and I will further progress and strengthen our ethics and compliance program.”
Apart from the Kazakhstan investigation, Enders’s allusion to ethics and compliance also relates to the company’s failure to identify intermediaries in applications for export credit financing for certain airline customers. Probes by UK, French, and German authorities effectively cut off Airbus’s access to export credit finance until the investigations close.
More recently, the company acknowledged that it had discovered “certain inaccuracies” in declarations to the U.S. State Department under International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), a section of U.S. law covering arms sales.