By Charlie Charalambous
STATE auditors yesterday descended on the luxury Limassol home of Interior Minister Dinos Michaelides as part of a corruption probe into his financial dealings.
A team of officials headed by Auditor-general Spyros Christou arrived at the minister’s house in the upmarket Kalogerou area of Yermasoyia, Limassol, at 1.10pm.
The purpose of the visit was to catalogue the size of the house and surrounding property, and the materials used to build it.
“Our aim is to estimate the value of Michaelides’ residence, because Pourgourides claims it cost £600,000,” Christou said yesterday.
He said his officials were only interested in immovable property, and not in the actual contents of the house.
Michaelides arrived half an hour before the Auditor-general in order to accompany the officials around his home, but was less than pleased about the intrusion.
“This is not the happiest day of my life, but it’s about the truth coming out and I will get through this torment with my family,” Michaelides told reporters.
Suspicions over how the minister had got the money to build his house were raised when Disy deputy Christos Pourgourides mentioned the Yermasoyia residence 10 days ago in his initial list of 14 allegations of corruption against Michaelides.
Pourgourides claimed Michaelides had built the huge luxury mansion, valued at over £600,000, without needing to take out a loan.
According to the deputy, this is just one example of how the minister allegedly abused his position to accumulate wealth and property estimated at a total value of over £2 million.
When the allegations were first made public, Michaelides denied his residence could be termed a mansion or that it was worth as much as £600, 000.
Michaelides told a press conference on September 18 that his home was worth around £250,000.
Michaelides also said that he had built the house – with money received from selling inherited property – in 1990, three years before he became Interior Minister in the Clerides government.
His previous stint as Interior Minister was between 1985 and 1988, under then president Spyros Kyprianou.
While state officials were examining the minister’s house, a second team of investigators was sent to check another Pourgourides allegation – that a road had been narrowed to bypass a garden owned by the minister’s wife.
The deputy claims that a road widening project in Limassol’s Mesa Yitonia took a diversion when it came up against a house owned by the minister’s wife.
The Christou probe into the Pourgourides allegations – ordered by Clerides – is expected to be completed by the end of October.
