By Hamza Hendawi
FINANCE Minister Christodoulos Christodoulou may leave the cabinet early next year to take up a job offer as director of the island’s Association of Commercial banks. The job will reportedly earn the 59-year-old Christodoulou a handsome £60,000 a year.
“If I finally accept the offer that will be in a few weeks, and it will not affect my position (until then) as finance minister,” he said yesterday.
Government officials meanwhile said that Christodoulou, who first took the finance brief in November 1994, was expected to remain in his post until the House ratified the 1999 budget next month.
It was not immediately clear why Christodoulou wanted to leave his key cabinet post at the head of the powerful Finance Ministry to take a job as director of the Association of Commercial Banks, notwithstanding the attraction of a huge salary.
Informed sources said that President Glafcos Clerides, while keen to replace Christodoulou, did not want to see him leave the cabinet and offered him another ministerial brief. Christodoulou, according to the sources, turned down the offer.
Christodoulou has over the years built a reputation for being blunt and straight talking. This, according to the sources, was partly to blame for a certain lack of popularity among some of the island’s influential businessmen. “He does not have many friends in the private sector,” said one source.
“There has been a great deal of pressure from the big businessmen to remove Christodoulou from the finance ministry, but he chose to leave the cabinet rather than take a lesser brief,” said the source.
A career civil servant, the minister is a stalwart of Disy, the senior partner in Clerides’ ruling coalition. For a brief period last summer Christodoulou appeared to have lost the whole-hearted support of his party colleagues after a proposed tax package was thrown out of the House, causing Clerides’ government acute embarrassment.
Even Disy’s coalition partners voted against the package last May, saying they had not been adequately consulted about the measures and Disy leader Nicos Anastassiades later complained that cabinet ministers from the party were showing disregard by not consulting with its leadership.
Since the débâcle in the House last May, Christodoulou has never tired from telling anyone who would listen that the fiscal deficit and public debt would continue to widen unless Parliament adopted measures to boost state revenues.
He warned last week that Value Added Tax must climb seven percentage points from the present eight per cent if the island hopes to become a European Union member by January 1, 2003, as it hopes. The House last May rejected a four percentage point rise in VAT as part of the tax package which, had it been adopted, would have earned the treasury £150 million in additional revenues.
Christodoulou, if indeed he does leave the finance ministry, would take credit for a dazzling set of economic indicators. The economy is set to grow by 4.7 per cent this year, while inflation and unemployment are both below three per cent and expected to decline further in 1999.
