THE OPPOSITION yesterday accused the government of dealing a blow to the country’s reliability abroad as recriminations over Wednesday’s botched meeting on the economy continued.
Meanwhile Finance Minister Charilaos Stavrakis invited political parties to a new meeting in two weeks time, given that they either failed to show or left Wednesday’s meeting before it even started.
Government coalition partners AKEL and DIKO were left talking among themselves as DISY and the European Party chose to boycott the meeting while EDEK and the Greens walked out after receiving the government proposals submitted to the European Commission earlier this month as its convergence program for 2009-2013.
Yesterday, DISY deputy chairman Averof Neophytou charged that the government has “succeeded in hurting our country’s reliability in Europe and internally.”
“They cannot, in 2010, blame the global economic crisis for their ineffective or inexistent financial policies,” Neophytou said.
DISY chief Nicos Anastassiades said his party will look into whether they will attend the new meeting.
Anastassiades reiterated that DISY was prepared to share the political cost.
“But we are not prepared to listen and obey,” the DISY leader said. “I repeat, we are a responsible party, which does not deny its political responsibility but it does not tolerate some people’s Stalinist mentality.”
DISY says any consultations on the government proposals should have taken place before they were sent to Brussels and not after.
The government insists the proposals are ‘live’ and still open to contributions from parties and the social partners.
It is a ‘live’ text that accepts enrichment and changes, AKEL spokesman Stavros Evagorou said.
“This proves that to reach our final target a continuous dialogue between the government, political parties and social partners will be necessary,” Evagorou said.
He urged DISY and the European Party to attend the new meeting, tabling specific views and proposals and contributing to the collective effort for the recovery of the economy.
Former government partners EDEK slammed the fact that “we had been ignored … before the formation of the specific plan” but said they will study the proposals and give their views in the next 10 to 15 days.
The government aims in cutting public deficit to 6.0 per cent of GDP in 2010 from a projected 7.0 per cent if no measures are taken and gradually reduce it to 2.5 per cent of GDP by 2013.
Among the proposals are cuts in the public sector wage-bill through reducing the number of civil servants, introducing a wage freeze and a 10 per cent cut in the income of various high-ranking state officials including the president.
It also plans to introduce income criteria in targeting social benefits and rigorously fight tax evasion.
Fuel tax is expected to increase as well as VAT introduced on food and drugs.
“We have been breaking the law for two years now,” Stavrakis said. “The European acquis communitaire says member-states should have a minimum duty on petroleum products.”
Cyprus has managed to postpone the enforcement of this tax but Stavrakis said a lot of pressure is put on the island from Brussels about the matter.
“Inevitably it is a tax that has to be imposed. We will fight to get a postponement, which I believe will not be long unfortunately,” the minister said.
