The monarch airlines situation is interesting in that the airline was in trouble financially last year and recieved investment from Greybull , it was then that monarch decided to stop giving ATOL protection to flights only in that it could be trusted like a scheduled airline , less than 12 months it goes into administration and the Government decides to pay the repatriation costs of ALL stranded passengers ( some were ATOL protected as they had a monarch flight / hotel package ) the government can reclaim those costs from the ATOL fund as a 2.50 levy is paid by the airline to protect in these situations and also ask passengers who booked a flight only to reclaim from their credit card company if they purchased in this way ( cost has to be £100 plus ) . The administrators for monarch have successfully managed to claim ownership of the landing slots at LGW and LTN and have already sold the LGW slots to BA / IAG ( for an estimated £50m ) this money now goes to the creditors and that means Greybull will hope to cover the money they invested along with other assets sold as they are on the top list of creditors . Greybull have indicated that they have a moral duty to repay costs incurred by the government bailout . It will be interesting to see if the government pursues regaining all costs incurred from the repatriation and also how much Greybull do actually repay .

I get why the government did repatriate passengers who were not covered by the ATOL scheme ( damned if they do , damned if they don't ?? ) but if they are looking into airline insolvency arrangements they would also do well to look into making sure all passengers are covered by the ATOL scheme which had funds to cover the monarch repatriation twice over and not put the initial cost on the taxpayer .

The question that needs to be answered is why were monarch allowed to stop paying the ATOL protection especially with them having financial problems