The company's previous finance chief had been fired after a court found he had destroyed documents pertaining to a lawsuit against the carrier filed by Hawaiian Airlines.
The struggling Mesa Air Group announced on Friday that it has accepted the resignation of its interim CFO, William Hoke, seven months after he replaced the company's previous finance chief.
Hoke, who resigned on May 23 "to pursue another career opportunity," Mesa stated in an 8-K filing, joined the carrier in March 2007 as vice president of finance. Michael Lotz, the company’s current president and Chief operating Officer and Principal Accounting Officer, will serve as interim CFO "until a suitable replacement is found," according to the company.
Hoke became interim CFO in November 2007 after the company fired George "Peter" Murnane III. The move followed the U.S. Bankruptcy Court's finding that Mesa had violated a confidentiality agreement with Hawaiian Airlines. Mesa noted that the court found that Murnane had destroyed evidence pertaining to Hawaiian’s breach-of-contract lawsuit against Mesa. The court awarded Hawaiian $80 million in damages and ordered Mesa to pay Hawaiian’s litigation costs and attorneys’ fees. Mesa reportedly settled with Hawaiian Airlines in April and agreed to pay $52.5 million to Hawaiian for using the proprietary information to help Mesa compete with it in Hawaii.
Before joining Mesa, Hoke was vice president of finance for Insight Enterprises in Tempe, a publicly traded provider of information technology products, from April 2001 to November 2006. Before that, he held a number of senior management posts with companies in Phoenix including Deloitte & Touche and Telespectrum Worldwide. At presstime, Mesa had not responded to a phone call by CFO.com, and Hoke had not returned messages left on his voicemail at the company and at his home in Tempe, Arizona.
Mesa is currently appealing the prospect of a Nasdaq delisting spurred by the company's failure to file its first-quarter financials. On May 13, it filed a notice with the Securities and Exchange Commission stating that the company would put off filing its 10-Q for the quarter ended March 31 until May 20, 2008 until June 2 Mesa. As of June 6, the company had apparently not filed.
Mesa is also extremely strapped for cash. In a May regulatory filing, the company contended that if Delta Air Lines terminates an agreement for Mesa to provide connecting flights to the larger carrier, it wouldn't have enough cash flows from operations and available working capital to meet its cash requirements.