India Approves Singapore Airlines’ $360M Investment for Air India-Vistara Merger

It effectively clears the last hurdle in the way of merger between Air India with Tata Group-owned Vistara by giving an in-principle approval for investment worth USD 360 million by Singapore Airlines. The Government of India has approved the foreign direct investment by Singapore Airlines in the proposed merger of the airline companies Air India and Vistara.

Owned by Tata Group and Singapore Airlines, Vistara plans to induct four more planes by the end of this year. The other part of the deal was to sell a 25.1 per cent stake in Air India to Singapore Airlines. That too was likely to be completed by this year-end.

Besides anti-trust and Merger Control clearances and other government and regulatory approvals already received, the airline said in a filing to the Singapore Stock Exchange that these are major completion milestones for the proposed merger. “It said the completion of this merger is subject to compliances of applicable laws in India and that the completion is likely to come about in the next couple of months, i.e., by end-2024,” the statement added.
As stated above, subject to extension amongst others, a long stop date is agreed by Singapore Airlines w.r.t the merger to delay the same by 31 October 2024.
It was only this June 2024 that NCLT gave its approval to merge Air India with Vistara into one of the largest airline conglomerates in the world.