But surely Raburn knew the true state of Nimbus?
"Ilia Lekach is an entrepreneur, and on that basis I liked dealing with him. I like the guy because of his just sheer, unmitigated balls. He sees an opportunity, and he says, 'I don't know anything about aviation, but I know this is a product that has mass and value,' and he said to me, 'I'm going to make this happen.' I have a soft spot in my heart for people that do that. I never expected to see United or American Airlines coming in and saying, 'We need to buy a bunch of airplanes because we want to obsolete our current business model.' Big companies never do that....
"Does Ilia have real successes and real failures? Do I see Ilia being much different than about another thousand people? Have I an unbroken chain of nothing but successes? Absolutely not.... Do I wish Ilia had a big bank account and everything he'd ever done was totally successful? Of course, but we're in a business right now where everything we've done, people said couldn't be done, and everything we're trying to do, people maintain can't be done. That's going to extend to some of the people that go out and operate the airplanes for the first time."
And the "commitment" for $1.2 billion? "I saw Ilia four days after at a Deutsche Bank Alex, Brown conference [where Lekach and Raburn made a joint presentation]. I said, 'Guys, everyone in the world's calling me and saying this is total bullshit -- what's the deal?' They actually played back a voice mail from Dafin saying we have confirmation [of the cash commitment]. All I know is that ... I heard Dafin saying, 'We are [an affiliate of Royal Bank of Scotland].' You can say it." But, it is pointed out, they ain't. Raburn lets out a breath and says, "I have a fax from Royal Bank of Scotland saying they ain't." But he is adamant that it is not his responsibility to make announcements about announcements by Nimbus.
When it comes to Nimbus itself -- the company, not its press releases -- why did Eclipse become a 17.1% owner of its principal client?
"Nimbus owes us deposits," says Raburn. "They wanted to pay the deposits through stock. We told them we're going to turn around and monetize this stock as soon as we can -- sell it, liquidate it. It turns out they had such a low valuation and we ended up being such a big shareholder, there wasn't any way for us to sell it, so we sent it back saying, 'We're not accepting this as a deposit.' ... I guess the only way to explain it is we're not [now] an owner of Nimbus.... I understand how it looks.... [But] we have had absolutely no beneficial gain from that ownership, and any implication otherwise is really a crock of shit.... At best we were a bystander."
Yet Nimbus shares, in big blocks, have been virtually unsellable for a long time. Wasn't that obvious? "We actually thought we might have a chance of liquidating it," Raburn says. "I'm not going to blame a lot of things on other people. We made a decision, changed our mind, and returned the stock."
It turns out the huge order was only part of the deal. Talk about hope: according to Raburn, Nimbus promised to do more than order planes. This cash-strapped newcomer was going to help ensure that the planes would actually be built. " They were going to be an investor in us," Raburn says. But it didn't happen. Raburn turned the disappointment to his favor. "They had some beneficial terms." What sort of terms? "We revised the deal, the biggest portion of which is it became a nonexclusive deal."
A nonexclusive deal? That means it had been exclusive? In its own way, the disclosure is as revealing as Lekach's downshifting from 1,000 planes to 10. Had Raburn so badly needed the validation or promotional boost that he would hand an exclusive lock for air taxis -- our air taxis! -- to a company that was little more than hot-air taxis? "It's called first money in, and sometimes beggars can't be choosers," Raburn says wearily. "We were trying to be cooperative, to work with a large customer who was saying, 'Let us do this and we'll make it right.' Another perfect example of no good deed goes unpunished. Jeez, it's really wonderful when you can tell people to go away because they're not good enough to buy something from you."
That leaves the handling of that 1,000-plane order. Was it used to promote investment? Regarding one round of investment, when $62 million was closed, Raburn says: "All the money was already committed ... in August." In fact, the investment round closed on September 11, after Nimbus's August order of 1,000 jets. A subsequent tranche closed February 14 on the heels of Nimbus's February 11 announcement of that $1.2-billion "commitment" from an "affiliate" of Royal Bank of Scotland. "There's nothing we've kept from our investors," Raburn says. "This is not a public company. I know what I've told my investors, and I know what my investors understand. We were trying to work with a customer that didn't have the cash. It turns out it was a mistake. Now, I don't know how many other CEOs would stand up and say, 'I made a mistake,' but I made a mistake in accepting that stock. I'm also going to let my actions speak for themselves. We returned it.... Hey, in business you make decisions based on conditions at the time."
Just on the other side of Vern Raburn's office window, in the midday sunshine of Albuquerque, another plane taxis toward the runway. A propeller job. Its noise is masked by the window's thick glass. The office falls silent, yet within the sudden quiet it is almost possible to hear, like a persistent echo, the words of Ilia Lekach: "Nobody, nobody is going to take this away from me. I'm a hard man to take things away from."
Safe landing, Vern. We're in this together.
A former foreign correspondent covering Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, Hesh Kestin knows entirely too much about airports.
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