No plans to move Lufthansa cargo hub to Siberia

(FRANKFURT) - German airline Lufthansa has no immediate plans to move its central Asian cargo hub to Siberia despite Russian pressure, chief executive Wolfgang Mayrhuber said late Monday.

"We need sufficient technical infrastructures" before considering a shift to the Russian airport in Krasnoyarsk, Mayrhuber told reporters on condition that his comments not be released until midday Tuesday.

The remarks shed some light on Russian efforts to get Lufthansa Cargo to use Siberia's Krasnoyarsk airport as a refueling and freight distribution center.

Moscow revoked overflight rights for the freight carrier on October 28 for six days, arguing that a temporary agreement permitting the cargo flights to use Russian airspace had elapsed.

The affair, which forced Lufthansa cargo planes to make a costly detour en route to Astana, Kazakhstan, was seen as attempt to pressure the German carrier into moving its hub to Krasnoyarsk.

On Monday, Mayrhuber said his airline "would have wanted to" use Krasnoyarsk to begin with but that "the technical capabilities were not there."

The airport is reportedly not equipped for all-weather landings, especially in heavy fog, and a spokesman for the cargo carrier said last week that a move there now was "out of the question."

German Transport Minister Wolfgang Tiefensee nonetheless suggested Friday that Germany had accepted the transfer after bilateral negotiations.

Lufthansa is a private airline however, and on Sunday, the head of the cargo unit refused to accept a relocation to Siberia as a done deal.

"It is a strange move, ostensibly trying to force us to move our Asian hub from Astana to Siberia by revoking our overflight rights," Carsten Spohr told Welt am Sonntag newspaper.

"As a matter of principle, we cannot accept the one thing being made dependent on the other."

Mayrhuber underscored Monday that the cargo carrier's unwillingness to shift operations to Siberia was a separate issue that "has nothing to do with overflight rights."

The longer flights to Astana reportedly cost Lufthansa an additional 400,000 dollars per week, which the CEO said was "not an amount where we would say we'll let it slide."