Dividends uncertain for Qatas

Chairman of Qantas Airways, Leigh Clifford, has told the airline’s annual general meeting in Adelaide that he can’t say when dividends will return because the airlines has US$17 billion of aircraft on order and a credit rating to safeguard. Any future dividend payments, he said, would be a judgment call, considered against the airline’s capital needs. Clifford denied the airline had a cash flow problem. Credit rating is “very, very important” he said, when an airline has a US$17 billion acquisition program. “So we have got to be very conscious of our credit rating because a number of those planes,