KUALA LUMPUR, April 23 — The downsizing at Malaysia Airlines Bhd (MAB) cannot be avoided if the new national carrier is to be sustainable, controlling shareholder Khazanah Nasional Bhd said today amid complaints by staff unions.

According to Khazanah, MAB must trim 6,000 jobs to reach a more sustainable 14,000 headcount, but has tried its best to do the exercise properly and humanely by offering jobs elsewhere.

“The point of NewCo is going to a new ship with a size and business practices that can work and be sustained,” Khazanah managing director Tan Sri Azman Mokhtar told reporters at the sidelines of Invest Malaysia 2015, using another name for MAB.

“No point of us just transferring everything and then, two three years down the line, you have to pump in another few billion.”

“This time we have to get it right, otherwise the problems will persist,” Azman stressed.

The national carrier was delisted in August after sovereign wealth fund Khazanah Nasional offered to buy out minority shareholders for a total of RM1.38 billion to restructure MAS, which suffered two air disasters this year.

The total takeover will cost Khazanah RM6 billion after the twin tragedies of MH370 and MH17 had threatened to overwhelm MAS’s finances.

The sovereign wealth fund later unveiled a 12-point turnaround plan for the national carrier, titled “Rebuilding A National Icon – The MAS Recovery Plan”, which includes transferring all MAS assets to the new entity.

Despite that, Azman said that the final decision on the layover will be left to the new management led by freshly-appointed chief executive Christoph Mueller.

Last month, six worker unions demanded that top officials of old carrier Malaysia Airlines System Bhd (MAS) and Khazanah be removed in place of the 6,000 workers that will be made redundant in the flag carrier’s restructuring.

According to local business paper The Edge Financial Daily, the unions led by Tan Sri Zainal Rampak and representing up to 13,000 MAS employees said “mismanagement” on the part of MAS and Khazanah as well as their “failure to turn around the airline on numerous occasions” were reason enough for the officials to go rather than workers.

Maybank Investment Bank Bhd’s aviation analyst Mohshin Aziz predicted today that MAS will shut down several international routes including Paris, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Istanbul, Dubai and Kunming as part of its turnaround exercise.