Logos finally signs deal with Greece’s Mega

By Charlie Charalambous

LOGOS’ very own ‘who will lease the station’ soap opera ended yesterday when an agreement was reached with Greece’s Mega Channel.

“The process of handing over the station started this morning,” Logos legal counsel Aris Hadjipanayiotou said yesterday.

Church-owned Logos finally ended the on-off deal with Mega yesterday and signed an agreement for the private channel to pay £560,000-a-year in rent to the Orthodox church.

Recent months have seen Logos going back and forth between Greek channels Mega and Skai, as well as a third unnamed party.

Logos has struggled to gain a ratings foothold and sees the Greek deal as away of stemming the flow of money needed to prop up its less commercially orientated mandate.

Mega TV has signed a 10-year lease worth £5.6 million.

Once the paperwork is complete, Logos will officially become Mega Cyprus — in a similar relationship with its Greek parent as that enjoyed by popular rival Antenna.

It is understood that under the agreement, three hours of religious programmes will be transmitted in the early morning or afternoon, but after 5pm there will be no Church censorship or controls on programming schedules.

However, Mega is said to have promised to tone down its more risqué programmes and stick to its formula diet of soaps, melodramas, tabloid news and glitzy game shows.

No date has been announced for Mega’s launch in Cyprus, but it is expected to take place in the coming weeks.

Mega TV is entering an overcrowded and fiercely competitive media dog fight for a relatively small audience, but the Greek station is expected to launch an aggressive marketing campaign.

Logos has encountered huge losses for a number of years, but with Mega coming in local jobs are said to be secure.

Logos radio and the channel’s Logosnet internet service are not affected by the deal and remain under Church administration.

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.