Minister hits back at hunters’ call for resignation

By a Staff Reporter

RESIGNATION demands from the powerful hunting lobby yesterday prompted Agriculture Minister Costas Themistocleous to issue a seven-page reply to the hunters’ claims that he was refusing to consult with them.

On Wednesday, the Cyprus Hunting Association complained before the House Agriculture Committee that Themistocleous was refusing to let them in on EU harmonisation discussions concerning hunting issues.

“The Minister refuses to see us. He will not even tell us what the criteria are for us to take part in the negotiations. He tells us he will call us when he deems it necessary,” Association chairman Tasos Lordos told the committee. “Fifty thousand hunters demand the Minister’s resignation,”

Lordos added, showing off the full strength of the hunting lobby. Themistocelous had not been present at the committee, but he wasted no time in responding to Lordos’ attack yesterday. He issued a two-page statement in which he flatly denied refusing to talk to the hunters and detailed all the meetings he had had with them since December 1998.

Themistocleous pinned official press releases about his meetings with the hunters to his statement in order to prove his point. ‘I challenge the hunters’ leadership to state when they ever asked for a meeting with me and were refused,” Themistocleous stated. “Nothing of the sort ever happened,” he added.

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.