HALLELUJAH, praise the Lord and glory to Allah – the Fantastic Dr Madsakis Show is back in Cyprus for the festive season, after his mega-successful, sell-out tour of Europe and Turkey. And he is planning a brand new one-man-show for the country of his birth, titled Mad Mats 5.
Yes, Super-Mario is seriously considering standing in the presidential elections because he is bitterly disappointed with the three main candidates, who are, quite simply, not as good as him. The inspiration for the new show, he explained to Simerini, was provided by the three candidates standing for election. He said:
“I am trying to convince myself, that I will eventually find who is the one-eyed among the blind [candidates] so I can back him, but, unfortunately, I have yet to discover the one-eyed candidate. Until now, listening to what the candidates have been saying, I believe they are causing only harm to the country.”
Voters “are in despair”, he said, because there was no suitable candidate, at least no-one who can walk to places without a guide-dog, which is why the crazy doctor is threatening to star as Moshe Dayan of the election pantomime. He is currently working on his script and expects to announce his decision in the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day.
Why is he delaying his decision? Does he expect a Christmas miracle that would make one of the blind candidates see again (at least through one eye) and therefore worthy of our vote?
THE SIX MILLION euro question is what inspired the loony doctor to toy with idea of standing, when he knows his candidacy would have no chance of getting more than two per cent of the vote?
Anti-authority rebels among our customers take the view that we will see Madsakis, the political suicide bomber, hell-bent on blowing up the Ethnarch’s re-election prospects in a spiteful act of revenge for being shabbily treated by Tassos and his party DIKO. Madsakis has been in the political wilderness since his expulsion from DIKO and without a party has no chance of being re-elected to the European Parliament next year. Unlikely to be welcomed with open arms by any party other than Talat’s CTP, his political prospects appear as rosy as England’s chances of winning Euro 2008.
ONE-EYED Mario therefore has nothing to lose by standing in the presidential elections and exacting revenge on Tassos by splitting the pro-partition vote and preventing him from entering the second Sunday run-off. Because let’s face it, the only people likely to vote for the crazy corpse examiner are hardline nut-cases who would have normally voted for the Ethnarch.
For now, Dr Mad has been restricting himself to issuing announcements disparaging the government, DIKO and individuals belonging to the party. He blasted EU Health Commissioner Marcos Kyprianou and the government for making a complete cock-up of foot and mouth. This week, he savaged Kyprianou for “making a mess of things again”, with regard to cross-border health-care. He eloquently titled his announcement about poor old Marcos, as Euro-gaffe 2.
He has also ridiculed the Tassos alliance parties for not having a presence in the European Parliament. The man seems determined to cause maximum damage to the Ethnarch… but could he be bluffing?
THE EXPLOSIVES may have been strapped to his body, but cynics believe that he has no intention of detonating them. The latest show is being staged in the hope that DIKO and Tassos would offer him inducements not to stand and weaken the pro-partition vote.
They may go as far as to welcome him back to the DIKO fold, even promise him a ministerial post in the new government, if this would stop him from taking the role of the one-eyed candidate.
But if the Ethnarch fails to make an attractive peace offering in the next few days, he would not only lose pro-partition votes in February, he could also lose his self-declared title as the candidate who is best-equipped to defeat the evil foreigners’ designs on Cyprus. When it comes to putting up dogged fights against foreign powers nobody does it better than Mad Mats, the one-man resistance force. Just ask the Turks and the Brits.
If there is no compromise, Mad Mats 5 will be on general release at K Cineplex in all towns from January 2.
IN ANOTHER announcement released this week, Dr Sakis slammed the government’s failure to follow the Council of Europe’s instructions for the appointment of a Cypriot judge to the European Court of Human Rights in order to replace Loucis Loucaides who is retiring. As a result of the cock-up, no judge was appointed and Loucaides was reportedly forced to put his retirement back by three months.
Judge Loucaides was in Cyprus this week and decided to impart some of the wisdom he acquired in his nine years in Strasbourg. He decided to offer his countrymen a little advice on how to decide who to vote in the presidential elections. The medium he used was the morning radio show of his friend Lazaros Mavros, the Ethnarch-worshipping presenter, who offers a daily patriotic wake-up call and national sermon.
Loucaides, a vociferous opponent of the A-plan, spoke of the dangers of another unfair settlement plan being offered to Cyprus, which made it necessary to elect a president capable of saying no to the foreigners. It was as if he had been briefed about what to say by the Ethnarch’s campaign organisers. To maintain the pretence of impartiality, he did not name the candidate people should vote for but even a person with the IQ of a TV reporter could have guessed who he wanted us to vote for.
AS A FINAL word of advice, the learned judge urged people to think of the national interest in choosing a president. People should not vote for a candidate because he had promised to give them or a member of their family a job in the public service, pleaded Loucaides. They should rise above this pettiness and back the man who would best serve the country’s national interests, he banged on.
The morally superior Loucaides should make some allowances for weak people, who put the personal ahead of the national interest and sell their soul to the politicians for a job in the public service. Loucaides has the luxury of having two smart kids who got jobs in the public service thanks to their abilities, without their father having to promise to back a politician in exchange for a rusfetological appointment. He would have voted for the Ethnarch even if his son’s application for a job at the Public Information Office was unsuccessful. His daughter works at the Attorney-general’s office where her dad worked for many years, reaching the position of deputy AG.
The wise old judge should show a little more understanding for his less principled countrymen who cannot treat the public service as their family business and have to kiss the ass of unpatriotic candidates in order to get state job. One moral question Loucaides did not address was the following: would it be acceptable to vote for the Ethnarch because he promised us a public service job, even though we think Christofias would better serve the national interest?
YOU KNOW it’s December when deputies start to discuss the approval of lunatic laws. This December, they approved the monumentally stupid law which would exempt people and companies from paying any fines and interest on income tax debts incurred before 2002.
No rational justification was given for this law, which rewards the tax cheats and treats the people who pay their tax dues on time as mugs. Rumours suggest that one of the beneficiaries of this blatantly discriminatory law would be the Zeus media group, which supposedly asked specific deputies to help it out, in exchange for glowing coverage of their activities.
The bill was approved with the votes of DISY, AKEL, EDEK and Euroko. Why the communists of AKEL backed a bill clearly designed to help fat cat capitalists not to pay penalties for their tax debts we do n
ot know. It is a funny way of displaying its oft-declared commitment to clamping down on tax evasion.
THE ARCHITECT of the Tass News Agency, Themis Themistocleous, the head of EU representation in Cyprus, had his prayers answered this week. He was appointed general manager of RIK, four years after he had applied for the job and failed to get it. Marios Mavrikios was appointed at the time, but his appointment was declared null and void a few months ago by the Supreme Court over a technicality.
This opened the door for Themis, even though there were other candidates who had scored higher than him in the evaluations four year ago, and are now considering appealing against his appointment. In the Cyprus public sector, it is not the best person who gets the job but the person with the best lawyer. Not so in the case of Themis, who enjoys the favour of the Ethnarch, after the sterling work he had done for him as head of Tass.
In fact, the speed with which he was installed as GM of RIK was quite astonishing. I suspect the Ethnarch wanted him there so he could run the presidential propaganda corporation in the crucial few weeks before the elections. His appointment was ratified by the Council of Ministers on Wednesday morning.
Strangely, the RIK diary for 2008, which reached our establishment on the very same day, had Themis listed as the corporation’s GM. But the diary had been typeset several weeks earlier in order to be printed, bound and delivered by Wednesday, so how could he have been named as GM before the government had ratified the board’s decision?
THE GROVELLING support offered to the Ethnarch by Antenna was rewarded earlier this week with an exclusive story. The station film crew was the only one which was invited to cover a meeting, attended by Tassos, Dr Faustus and Syria’s charg? d’affaires that discussed the Latakia-Famagusta cruise link. “Secret meeting…” was how the reporter started his coverage for the Antenna TV news. How secret is a meeting covered by the Antenna film crew? Only a person with the intellectual powers of a TV reporter could answer that one.
OUR FRIENDS the Russians may be giving us their unstinting support on the Cyprob at the UN Security Council, but their Finance Ministry has not been very friendly to the Republic. It recently placed us on a draft black-list, together with a host of other countries for our tax offices’ failure to provide it with information it regularly requested.
Other EU member countries which had been placed on the list satisfied the not unreasonable demands of Russians and were removed from the draft black list, but not the Cyprus Republic, which did not take the matter very seriously. Only recently has it dawned on our arrogant public officials that staying on the list could be catastrophic for our economy, given the huge revenue we take from Russian businesses.
Now our dozy officials are trying to sort things out, but it remains to be seen whether the snubbed Russians will be persuaded to remove Cyprus from the list. Perhaps our Ethnarch will have to call his friend Sergei Lavrov and make him another promise about blocking the EU’s moves on Kosovo.
SPEAKING of the Kosovo dispute, it has been exploited to the full by our government. First we promised the Russians we would veto the EU’s moves to recognise it as an independent state if they arranged to remove the reference to the isolation of the Turkish Cypriots from he UN Secretary-general’s report.
At the EU, we agreed to back the compromise decision on Kosovo, on condition that European Commissioners would not have meetings with Turkish Cypriot officials. Commissioner Ollie Rehn kept his promise and refused to see TC ‘prime minister’ Ferdi Soyer, who returned to the island seething about the snub. OK, Tassos may have got some satisfaction from Soyer’s humiliation, but this is not foreign policy, it is school-ground pettiness.
And for how long does he plan to be using the Kosovo card to extract advantages both from Russia and the EU?
THE FORMER deputy leader of the Micky Mouse party belonging to Timis Efthymiou (cannot remember its name) has alleged that the party was given £20,000 by the Ioannis Kassoulides team to back him for the presidency. The allegation has been denied.
If it were true, I think Kass did the right thing for the country. In the previous elections, Timis’ party backed Tassos and in exchange got a ministry. Now would it not have been better for the country if Tassos gave Timis 20 grand and not have had to make him a minister? At least Kass has paid his debt and the country would be spared of having Timis as minister of agriculture again.
IF MAD MATS could be bought, I would have suggested to our Ethnarch to give him a few 100 grand in order not to stand for the presidency. But unfortunately for the Ethnarch, that is not an option, because Mats is known for his incorruptibility. So he may have to offer the agriculture ministry to him instead.
LAST WEEK, wrote about Phil’s opulent bash for 300 guests at the island’s most expensive hotel, the Anassa. We received a letter from the Phil group’s head honcho Nicos Pattichis informing us that the bash was not thrown by Phil but by Omikron magazine (which belongs to him and his cousin, not the Phil group) together with Thanos Hotels, which owns the Anassa. Their guests were business associates and regular customers of the hotel, and not the glamour set of Cyprus. We apologise for any distress our inaccurate information may have caused.
THANKFULLY, we have got to the end of this week’s shop unaffected by the spirit of goodwill that plagues Christian societies at this time of year. Merry Christmas anyway.
