THERE IS nothing more nauseating than listening to a bunch of self-important lawyers advertising their moral, professional and intellectual superiority.
Antenna’s lunchtime show on Tuesday featured four insufferably arrogant lawyers, competing over who would inflict the greatest humiliation on the fifth studio guest. It deserves to be released on DVD as a classic of the genre.
It could be a very useful tool for parents who do not want their kids to become lawyers when they grow up. It remains unclear who can be given directorial credit, because the suspected director, Antenna’s autocratic ruler Loukis P, has distanced himself from the show. The pretty-boy presenter claims he had invited the pack of wolves and said the lamb he had chosen for them to savage on air was happy to appear.
In the role of lamb was the mild-mannered, shy and softly-spoken Toumazos Tselepis, the president’s negotiations adviser, who was declared unqualified for the job 10 days ago by another lawyer with a big ego, Ethnarch junior.
Inevitably, once the lawyers realised they were getting nowhere by shouting at the unpatriotic Tselepis, they raised the issue of his ‘poor qualifications’ which they claim is the reason comrade Tof is making big concessions to the Turks at the talks. This led Tselepis to walk out of the studio, prompting another round of moralising by the insufferable lawyers and the presenter.
TSELEPIS’ PhD in Public and International Law is not a satisfactory qualification for the lawyers on the panel. As the grumpy old lawyer Loucis Loucaides, a former judge at the ECHR who finds difficulty stringing together a coherent sentence, asked: “Are you a lawyer?” Tselepis said “no” and Loucaides, with spittle coming out of his mouth, smugly responded, “And you will not become one”.
Why would he want to anyway? Why would anyone want to become a lawyer and end up a cantankerous, mean-spirited, patronising bully like Loucaides? It is not as if you need great intelligence or special qualities to join the profession – the Antenna studio panel made this obvious.
The claim that you have to be a practising lawyer to be able to participate in the Cyprob talks was another stupidity expounded by one of our learned friends.
Treating the Cyprob as a legal matter for lawyers to resolve is why there will never be a settlement. As one Cyprus-based diplomat astutely remarked many years ago, “How can you solve the Cyprus problem when there are 40,000 troops in the north and 30,000 lawyers in the south?”
The attorneys on the studio panel were all anti-solution, which may explain why they want lawyers handling the talks.
ONE OF THE studio guests was an upstart lawyer called Giorgos Christodoulou, whom nobody had ever heard of or seen before. Even though he is neither a constitutional expert nor Cyprob specialist – or even particularly smart – he is a practising lawyer and therefore qualified to express an opinion about rotating presidency.
Only later did it surface that he was on the show because he was an employee at Loukis P’s law office, presumably representing his master’s voice – or maybe not.
What is certain is that he was trying to impress his boss by angrily waving his finger at Tselepis and repeating the same idiotic thing over and over again: “Rotational presidency is a Turkish proposal.” Though a practising lawyer and therefore a superior professional, he did not know that Turks are also allowed to make proposals in the Cyprob negotiations.
STAR of the show was the smooth-talking, self-regarding legal eagle Christos Clerides, who made his name as an anti-A plan campaigner and subsequently reaped big financial benefits by filing recourses to the ECHR for naive refugees, who thought this would be a better way of getting their properties back than voting for the plan.
Clerides behaved like an ultra-competitive and insecure school-kid who will resort to the basest of methods to belittle his classmates in order to satisfy his feelings of superiority.
Tselepis was finding it difficult to keep up with the discussion because he was not a lawyer, Clerides announced. He then patronisingly questioned the value of Tselepis’ PhD. “Where and how you received your PhD is another matter,” the superior he said, adding that he had checked the internet to investigate Tselepis’ qualifications.
Finally, he resorted to his superior intelligence to expose the fact that Tselepis was not a lawyer. “You have proved that you are not a lawyer because you constantly interrupt the other person… if you were a proper legal expert, you would know the first rule is that everyone must complete their argument, you take your notes and then respond.”
What a load of supercilious nonsense – this was a studio row, not the Nuremberg trials. His pompous assertion that interrupting someone was proof that you were not a legal professional inadvertently offered proof that the perfect Clerides is nowhere near as intelligent as he thinks he is.
WALKING out the studio was an over-reaction by Tselepis, which proved that he was not a practising lawyer. As the perfect one could tell him – if he were a proper legal expert, he would know that the second rule is that you sit and take the abuse until superior professionals decided they have humiliated you enough.
AKEL issued an announcement in support of Tselepis, castigating the undemocratic and unethical behaviour of the panel and predictably interpreting it as an attack against the President of the Republic, which is a big no-no for the democratic commies. Akelites interpret everything as an attack against the comrade president, as if such ‘attacks’ are against the law.
THE SAFEGUARDING of the greatness of our leader is of paramount significance to AKEL, the Central Committee of which decided on Tuesday to embark on a door-to-door campaign aimed at boosting the standing to the president.
A leaflet listing all the amazing achievements of the great leader, has been produced and will be distributed to houses by his comrades.
Instead of a campaign to persuade people about the benefits of settlement, AKEL will be wasting resources on a campaign telling us what a wonderful president comrade Tof is because his public adoration levels are declining.
This is despite Haravghi’s assurances that “Cyprus never had a state leader as sincere and human” as Tof, whose steps were guided by “patriotism and boundless love for the country.”
WE WERE reminded of our ability to live under big illusions by House president Garoyian in his verbose address to Greece’s PM George Papandreou during the latter’s visit to the legislature. “The harsh reality does not permit illusions or abandonment of the struggle,” he warned and added:
“Certainly our struggle is not easy and the path of the struggle was never easy, but we also know that no third party will give us our freedom and rights if we stop fighting for them with resolve and determination… the Cypriot people will continue the struggle to claim and secure justice and their rights.”
Which struggle is he talking about? The struggle to buy a flash car, the struggle to build a 500 square metre mansion, the struggle to get a civil service job, or to get a refugee ID card? How has Garoyian participated in this heroic struggle? What personal sacrifices has he made for the sake of the struggle he preaches? Is it because he stays in a room at five-star hotels rather than a suite when he is abroad conducting our struggle?
DR FAUSTUS has also been living and peddling the illusion, conducting the struggle with verbal torrents (and a much superior vocabulary than Garoyian’s) for decades. He always insisted he stayed in a luxury suite when abroad as House president and I am sure he has made many other sacrifices for the struggle.
The firebrand freedom-talker, who turns 90 next year, still has an army of 11 police bodyguards at his disposal and, it appears, will not hear of the number being reduced. We are happy to pay for 11 cops for him to carry on living under the illusion that he is important and needs protection from the evil forces that are out to get him.
I take this opportunity to announce the establishment of a Pancyprian Association for the Preservation of the Lyssarides Police Guard. We owe it to the old boy for all the sacrifices he has made for us.
THE ASSOCIATION may soon have to put up fight to keep the 11 cops, given how the police force is being depleted. On Friday a cop was kicked off the force for pocketing €67,000 that would have been used as evidence in a drugs related case.
The previous day another cop was suspended from his duties for gambling – playing cards in a coffeeshop (not this one) – while on duty. On Tuesday, the deputy chief ordered an investigation after Paphos cops roughed up a couple of monks protesting against the Church-organised interfaith conference, which was also attended by Catholic priests.
One of the cops pulled a fanatical monk by the pigtail and beard – surely an act deserving a medal – while another arrested a protesting layman because he boasted he had a British passport. The Paphos cop was outraged that an anti-Catholic, Orthodox campaigner was using his British passport to frighten him off. Reports said he told him, “You are being arrested for not respecting the Cyprus Republic.”
THE ORTHODOX nutcases, who had been campaigning against the presence of the Catholic priests at the Paphos conference since last weekend, were convinced that this was part of a plot to subjugate the Greek Orthodox Church by the Pope.
However it was a bit rich of the Archbishop to accuse them of being fanatics. Our Church is a bastion of fanatics run by a fanatic, so he should hardly be surprised if the ultra-faithful are ultra-fanatical. The million dollar question is who do we hate more – Roman Catholics or the Turks?
An answer may be provided next year, when the Pope is scheduled to visit in the first phase of the subjugation of our Church by Rome.
PRACTISING lawyer Akis Papasavvas ordered his lawyers to issue libel writs against a couple of publications, after his decision to issue a nolle prosequi against a young man implicated in a case where 12kg of cannabis was brought into Cyprus.
The young man in the grandson of the gardener at comrade presidente’s Kellaki dacha but this had nothing to do with Papasavvas’ decision, which is difficult to understand. The grandson received the cannabis from a young woman who was paid to bring the drugs from Amsterdam.
Police say he going to pass the load on to a drug baron and Papasavvas decided to drop the charges against him and use him as a prosecution witness against the big trafficker. However, the gardener’s grandson said he was scared to give testimony against the trafficker and went abroad… and so everyone got off except the woman, who is now serving a seven-year sentence.
Suggestions of a cover-up are outrageous. This was a case of good old-fashioned legal incompetence by a practising lawyer. The gardener’s grandson fooled Papasavvas into dropping the charges and did not keep his side of the deal.
REGULAR customers will know that Kathimerini (Cyprus) columnist and former, secret husband of Aliki Vouyiouklaki, Giorgos Eliades, reported Patroclos to the Cyprus Media Complaints Commission for supposedly interfering in his private life.
The crime was that I had urged Eliades, next time he interviewed himself in his column, if he could ask: ‘What was Aliki Vouyiouklaki like in bed?’ This may have been a bit crude but I felt there would have been much greater public interest in Eliades’ answer than for those given to questions about the Annan plan.
This week the Commission issued its decision on the complaint and ruled that Patroclos had violated the Code of Journalistic Ethics regarding the non-interference in a person’s private life.
I hope Eliades is satisfied with the decision as it was a big, powerful patsarka for Patroclos, even though not as painful or dizzying as the one he had originally thought of administering.
WE DO NOT have enough space to go into more detail about our defence to the Commission, but we will publish this next week, as long as Eliades does not secure a court injunction against us. Shortage of space obliges us to put off the presentation of Michalis Ignatiou’s new book for another week as well.
CAPTION: European Party (EVROKO) leader Demetris Syllouris and deputy leader Nicos Koutsou are unable to conceal their joy at meeting Greece’s prime minister George Papandreou last Tuesday. Both were heartened to hear that Papandreou would use the EU’s December deadline for Turkey not to impose sanctions but to speed up efforts to impose an unfair, unviable and unworkable, on Cyprus
