By Charlie Charalambous
THE CUT-THROAT world of media buyers, scheming advertising executives and TV sharks was revealed at yesterday’s House Watchdog Committee probe into the CTO’s overseas campaign budget.
Disy deputy Lefteris Christoforou raised doubts about whether the Cyprus Tourism Organisation’s £9.3 million budget was being put to good use in the light of recent scams in Belgium and Holland.
“There needs to more control on the procedures used to promote Cyprus tourism abroad. We always approve budget funds for tourism, but greater sensitivity needs to be shown on how the £9.3 million is spent,” said Christoforou.
And he cited the recent case concerning a Belgian advertising company that had used false invoices to charge the organisation for a non-existent media campaign.
The deputy charged that the CTO was open to similar scams because of its shoddy approach to monitoring overseas accounts.
Weaknesses in the CTO’s ability to keep tabs on overseas accounts were pointed out in the last Auditor-general’s report.
And Christoforou claimed that, in some instances, the CTO was paying over the odds to foreign advertising firms and being fobbed off with photocopies of invoices rather than the originals.
“Advertising contracts signed in Belgium, Holland and Switzerland were above the going rate, and the product was substandard.”
Christoforou pointed out that the Belgian fiasco had only been discovered by mistake, thanks to an eagle-eyed official who then revealed the CTO had accounts with the same company dating back to 1992, which could also have been fiddled.
Auditor-general Spyros Christou told the committee that after studying the Belgian company’s invoices, he believed the “books had been cooked”.
CTO vice-chairman Andreas Georgiou conceded that the CTO could in the past have been ripped off by advertising companies creaming off too much commission and charging a fortune for a lacklustre marketing strategy.
“Checks were insufficient, I believe we could have been short-changed in the past and we were not getting value for money.”
With the CTO still smarting from its Belgian experience (an investigation is on-going), its chairman Michael Erotocritou said the funds for the overseas campaign would undergo a major overhaul.
In an effort to make procedures more transparent, the CTO will seek the services of a single major advertising house to handle its account for the whole of Europe, rather than have them scattered around.
And the CTO aims to do likewise for accounts in the USA and elsewhere in the world.
