A FEW isolated incidents of rounding up continued to emerge yesterday as people thronged to the island’s banks for a second day running.
Michalis Kamas, a representative of the Commercial Banks’ Association, said banks were generally busy at this time of the year in any case, but estimated that the Cyprus pound would be totally out of circulation by around January 15.
As far as complaints were concerned, one caller to CyBC’s afternoon news programme said a water dispensing machine from which he used to receive 20 litres for £0.50 was now charging one euro, some eight cents higher.
A second caller said his cup of coffee at the Larnaca Hospital cafeteria had not only jumped overnight from £0.40 to £0.50 but was listed on the dual price display as €1.70, which is £1.00 or double the price.
He was advised by Nicosia Euro Observatory official Angelos Georgiou to report the incident to the Larnaca branch.
There are five such observatories around the island, which are tasked with looking into incident of profiteering.
Georgiou said the Nicosia office phones had not stopped ringing yesterday. The major complaints related to people being given the wrong change, but also included some cases of rounding up of prices.
He also raised the issue of parking fees, which the Consumers’ Association complained about yesterday for the second day running.
But Georgiou said none of the parking businesses had signed up for the Fair Pricing Code and so fell outside the jurisdiction of the Euro Observatories.
“This is a concern all over Cyprus,” he said, adding that the Finance Ministry was looking into it to see what could be done.
Andreas Christodoulides, the representative for the Paphos Observatory, said the complaints in his district were of a similar nature. He said the general picture for the first couple of days was that there was not a lot of rounding up of prices. “There have been no major problems and all businesses are operating with the two currencies,” he said, but added that like in other areas, many businesses had miscalculated the amount of euros they would need.
Also yesterday, petrol stations announced that they had solved the problem of credit card usage and that by the end of next week, all machines would be ready to accept euro notes.
