Headlines on 7-Oct-2009 announced that Central America’s TACA and Colombia’s Avianca were to merge. But behind headline, the back-story is far more intriguing. The actual plan involves quite a bit more than a simple merger - as the Latin American airline market gears up for titanic struggles. Avianca, as we detailed in our recent SWOT analysis, is owned, along with a number of other airlines and interests by Synergy Aerospace, itself a branch of the Synergy Group, with its primary focus as a Latin American oil and gas conglomerate. On the other side, the TACA group has been privately owned by the Kriete family since 1961 and they remain the largest shareholders in Grupo TACA Holdings. The agreement reached in October specifies that Synergy Aerospace was to acquire 2/3 of the Grupo TACA Holdings with the remaining third continuing to be held as at present. According to a presentation released at the time of the announcement “the shareholders have defined that the corporate governance of the company will be based on consensus”. But like Avianca and its widespread interests, Grupo Taca is a complex entity. With a history dating to 1931, aviation historian R.E.G. Davis has said that, “there has never been an airline quite like TACA anywhere in the world”. Its current form represents an interesting evolution that remains unique.

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