ABOUT 200 investors demonstrated outside the Stock Exchange yesterday to demand suspension of all share trading till their demands for radical measures to boost the bourse are met.
With the all share index hovering around the 200-point mark, investors, represented by the PASEXA association, want the state to set up a market ‘support’ fund to keep share values up and to end all taxation of share profits.
A slight market upturn for the second day running did nothing to still the anger of the PASEXA demonstrators, who converged on the bourse building on the outskirts of Nicosia as market bosses met inside yesterday afternoon. The protest passed off without incident.
Thousands of small investors have watched their shares plunge in value as the market has lost about 300 per cent of its value over the past 18 months. Parliament has approved a number of bills aimed at bolstering the flagging market, but to no avail.
PASEXA holds the state and market management responsible for the fall: “The criminal negligence of those in authority has brought tens of thousands of investors to the brink of bankruptcy,” the association stated in a press release.
“This crime against the people of Cyprus will not be forgotten,” PASEXA warned.
Finance Minister Takis Klerides — increasingly under fire over the market’s collapse – yesterday repeated that the state had done its best to help the market and would continue to do so.
“What I want to say is that we have already done much for the Stock Market and we have not exhausted out positive legislative intervention,” he said, suggesting more Stock Market boosting laws were in the pipeline.
Opposition party DIKO and fringe right-wingers New Horizons have been demanding Klerides’ head over the Stock Market fiasco. Klerides yesterday insisted he would not bow to such pressure.
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.
