Tesew appointed Ethiopian Group CEO
Tewolde GebreMariam, Ethiopian Airlines’ Group CEO, resigned suddenly due to health issues.
Girma Wake, a former CEO of Ethiopian Airlines, has been appointed as the airline’s new president and board chairman.
He had been in the United States for the previous six months seeking medical treatment. GebreMariam had worked for Ethiopian Airlines for 37 years before taking over as CEO in January 2011. In his previous position, he had been holding weekly management meetings from a distance.
In a statement, Ethiopian Airlines expressed its best wishes for GebreMariam and wished her a swift recovery. It congratulated him on the outstanding job he had done in expanding the airline company fourfold during his time in the position.
The Ethiopian Airlines crew member Tasew has been with the company for 38 years. He began his career with Ethiopian in 1984 as an associate engineer and worked his way up the ranks, eventually holding supervisory and management roles in the technical departments.
In 1997 and 1999, he was promoted to the positions of director operations & technical systems support and chief information officer, and he has held these positions since. He was promoted to vice president of maintenance and engineering in 2006, and then to Ethiopian chief operating officer in November 2010.
Since 2021, he has served as the chief executive officer of Asky Airlines, an Ethiopian Airlines-owned airline located in Togo. He will be leaving his present employment in the near future in order to return to Addis Ababa.
Wake, on the other hand, was the CEO that spearheaded Ethiopian’s transition and taught GebreMariam to take over the company’s leadership position once he resigned.
He joined Ethiopian in 1960 but left to work for other airlines, notably Gulf Air, where he was in charge of the cargo division, until being welcomed back to Addis in 2003, when he was 60, to take over as CEO of the airline.
His deputy, GabreMariam, took up the position in 2011, and he remained in it till the end of the year.
Until 2017, Wake also served as chairman of RwandAir, an ambitious and rapidly expanding airline.
