House approves £25 million for extra budgets

THE HOUSE Finance Committee yesterday gave the green light to supplementary budgetary bills of £25 million, but not without a few hiccups.

Akel’s George Lilikas said he had no disagreement with state aid for deserving causes. But he said the timing of the bills only a couple of months before the presidential elections of February 1998 was rather “strange”.

The reply came that it was the House of Representatives which had asked the government to submit all its supplementary budgetary bills together, twice a year.

There was another outburst, this time from Edek’s Takis Hadjidemetriou, over a request from the government that the House approve an extra £1 million to cover an early retirement scheme for 54 employees of the Cyprus Broadcasting Corporation (CyBC).

At issue was CyBC’s apparent disregard for the activities of the House of Representatives.

“There used to be one programme, now there is nothing at all. We want CyBC to come here and explain their policy on this issue,” he said.

The £25 million provisions examined yesterday include:

— £500,000 to subsidise loss making routes for rural bus lines;

— £900,000 to pay for the purchase of water from the new desalination plant;

— £360,000 for economic help to relatives of Greek soldiers killed in Cyprus in 1974;

— £2 million as subsidies for students who study abroad;

— £170,000 to rent the equipment to produce a multimedia event at the Cyprus pavilion during World Expo ’98 in Lisbon (the bill for the pavilion will total some £500,000, of which £300,000 is for the multimedia);

— £2 million to write off the income tax owed by the Larnaca Water Board;

— £2.1 million for medicine; another £1.5 million will go to the scheme which pays for Cypriots to travel abroad for medical treatment, bringing the total to £7.5 million this year;

— £1.1 million extra will finance the revamped state tuition centres, bringing their total cost this year to £2.3 million – in line with a pledge by the Education Ministry to boost tuition states centres in the afternoons so as to combat moonlighting;

— an extra £600,000 to pay for damage wrought by the 1996 earthquake; the government estimates it will pay out a total of £4.7 million for the 1996 earthquake. Another £2.6 million was paid out in damages for the 1995 quake;

— £920,000 in extra help for refugees;

— £1.9 million for those on the poverty line;

— £2.5 million in incentives for industry.

The bills will now be sent to the House plenary for approval.

The Cyprus Mail is the only English-language daily newspaper published in Cyprus. It was established in 1945 and today, with its popular and widely-read website, the Cyprus Mail is among the most trusted news sites in Cyprus. The newspaper is not affiliated with any political parties and has always striven to maintain its independence. Over the past 70-plus years, the Cyprus Mail, with a small dedicated team, has covered momentous events in Cyprus’ modern history, chronicling the last gasps of British colonial rule, Cyprus’ truncated independence, the coup and Turkish invasion, and the decades of negotiations to stitch the divided island back together, plus a myriad of scandals, murders, and human interests stories that capture the island and its -people. Observers describe it as politically conservative.