Emirates President Sir Tim Clark said the war in the Gulf region has again disrupted his plan to retire, Bloomberg reported.

Clark told the annual economic summit organised by the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung in Berlin that he had been thinking of stepping down after Emirates reported record profits earlier this year. “I thought the time had come, and suddenly war broke out,” he said, adding: “Here we are again.”

He said this was the second time that global events had forced him to postpone his retirement. The first time was in 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic upset his earlier plan to leave. Emirates announced in January 2020, through a staff memo from Chairman Sheikh Ahmed bin Saeed Al Maktoum, that Clark would retire in June of that year after 35 years with the airline and stay on as an adviser, according to reports at the time.

Clark, a British citizen who was knighted in 2014, has worked for Emirates since its founding in the 1980s, Gulf News reported. The paper described Emirates as the world’s largest long-distance airline and said the industry watches the airline’s succession plan closely. No successor has been named, and Clark provided no date for a new retirement plan in the remarks reported.

The Emirates Group reported a record profit of about 6.3 billion US dollars for the year to March, according to The National. The war involving Iran began on February 28, and Emirates has since said it had to deal with airspace closures and higher fuel costs. The airline’s chairman said last week, in the Group’s half-year results, that the Group’s profit before tax fell 66 percent for the six months to September.

Sources: Bloomberg