* Johnson questions bosses' pay ahead of collapse
* Johnson says taxpayer has had to foot the bill
* British state decided not to bail out Thomas Cook
* UK plans to fly 135,300 people back, 16,500 people today
(Adds business secretary, customer comments)
By Kylie MacLellan and Paul Sandle
NEW YORK/LONDON, Sept 24 (Reuters) - After the collapse of
Thomas Cook left tens of thousands of Britons reliant on the
government to bring them home, Prime Minister Boris Johnson
questioned whether the travel firm's bosses should have paid
themselves so much ahead of its demise.
Running hotels, resorts and airlines for 19 million people a
year, Thomas Cook currently has around 600,000 people abroad and
will need the help of governments and insurance firms to bring
them back from places as far afield as Cancun, Cuba and Cyprus.
Speaking in New York, Johnson questioned why the state
should be left responsible for the actions of handsomely paid
directors and said tour operators should have some sort of
insurance against such debacles.
"I have questions for one about whether it's right that the
directors, or whoever, the board, should pay themselves large
sums when businesses can go down the tubes like that," Johnson
said.
"You need to have some system by which tour operators
properly insure themselves against this kind of eventuality."
Thomas Cook was brought down by a $2.1 billion debt pile,
built up by a series of ill-fated deals, that hobbled its
response to nimble online rivals. It had to sell three million
holidays a year just to cover interest payments.
With the business draining cash, Chief Executive Peter
Fankhauser found its lenders were no longer willing to step in.
Fankhauser has earned 8.3 million pounds ($10.3 million),
including 4.3 million pounds in 2015.
The British government said it was unwilling to "throw good
money after bad" to back a bail out of the company.
Reports on Monday said the Turkish government and a group of
Spanish hoteliers were willing to support a 200 million pound
rescue plan underpinned by a British government guarantee.
Business Secretary Andrea Leadsom, however, said the sum
reported would not have kept the operator going for more than a
couple of weeks.
"There are all sorts of rumours flying, the fact is that 200
million (pounds) was even an underestimate of what Thomas Cook
would have needed just for the very short term, for the next
week or two," she told Sky News.
"Thomas Cook is sitting on trying to service 1.7 billion
pounds of debt, and it would have been a waste of taxpayers'
money to be throwing good money after bad."
Thomas Cook's demise, announced in the early hours of
Monday, sparked alarm at hotels where some customers have been
asked to pay their bills again by out-of-pocket resort owners.
"I think the questions we've got to ask ourselves now: how
can this thing be stopped from happening in the future?" Johnson
said.
"How can we make sure that tour operators take proper
precautions with their business models where you don't end up
with a situation where the taxpayer, the state, is having to
step in and bring people home?"
Emergency flights brought 14,700 people back to the United
Kingdom on 64 flights on Monday, and around 135,300 more were
expected to be returned over the next 13 days, Britain's
aviation regulator said.
"Just got to get through it," said Anthony Tents, a Thomas
Cook customer from central England trying to return home from
Mallorca in Spain. "We're going to get home but it's just some
of the people have lost their jobs, it's terrible, isn't it?."
Seventy-four flights were scheduled on Tuesday, to bring
back 16,500 people. More than 1,000 flights are planned.
"A repatriation of this scale and nature is unprecedented
and unfortunately there will be some inconvenience and
disruption for customers. We will do everything we can to
minimise this as the operation continues," Richard Moriarty,
Chief Executive at Britain's Civil Aviation Authority, said.
"We want people to continue to enjoy their holiday, so we
will bring them back to the UK on their original departure day,
or very soon thereafter."
($1 = 0.8052 pounds)
(Writing by Guy Faulconbridge; Editing by Mark Potter)