WE HAVE overdosed on happiness over the last seven days: a week of non-stop celebration with one piece of good news following the other in quick succession. I cannot remember the last time we had so many reasons to be cheerful in the same week.
It started with pseudo-celebrations for Dervis Eroglu’s pseudo-victory in the pseudo-elections last Sunday, which had all our politicians buying anti-depressants to cope with the grief that spread like an epidemic. They were all grief-stricken by this unfavourable development, shedding buckets of pseudo-tears for the demise of Mehmet Ali Talat.
If that is not cause for celebration, I do not know what is. When the prophets of doom and gloom – Omirou, Garoyian, Perdikis, et al – say that something is bad, 99 times out of 100 they are wrong. And they are 100 per cent wrong about Eroglu, who is much closer to our positions than Talat ever was.
First, he is not a lefty; second, he opposes suffocating time-frames, arbitration and talks; third, he is against rotating presidency; fourth he looks like Harpo Marx; fifth and most importantly, he abhors the idea of reunification and power-sharing.
OK, he may have disappointed us a bit by dismissing reports claiming he would make the Denktator his negotiator, but we can’t have everything our way. We should be celebrating all the negatives he would be bringing to the Cyprob talks instead of focusing on the only constructive decision he has taken. These anti-depressants are preventing our leaders from thinking straight.
DID YOU know that EDEK’s deputy leader Marinos Sizopoulos operates a TV complaints office? We didn’t either, but according to Simerini, he was the “recipient of many complaints by citizens in relation to the way state television covered the pseudo-elections”.
According to the paper, Sizopoulos said citizens were “mainly annoyed by the long duration of CyBC’s coverage and also with the significance attributed to the illegal elections by the state channel.” This prompted the deputy to ask the corporation’s management how much money it had spent covering the “illegal and irregular procedure”.
He was a bit harsh on the corporation, whose hacks in the north had displayed the highest levels of patriotic professionalism in their coverage. The adjective ‘illegal’ was used so frequently in their reports, at any minute you expected the cops to start arresting pseudo-citizens and pseudo-candidates.
It is not clear whether Sizopoulos’ TV complaints office was operating just for the pseudo elections or will carry on taking calls from annoyed citizens.
WE WERE still hung-over from the Eroglu celebrations, when news broke of the arrival of Qatar’s moneybags, Emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani. He came to sign the eagerly awaited deal to build a big complex opposite the Hilton Hotel in downtown Nicosia.
He even brought with him a scale model of the complex, which will include a hotel, apartments, office blocks and a shopping centre. Not the most original or exciting idea but if the Sheikh wants to spend a few of his bucks on a 220-room, luxury hotel in a city where the existing hotels are never full and depend on wedding receptions to survive, he is welcome to do so.
We are overjoyed that he will be spending some of his moolah here in these difficult times and for making fools of all those who mocked the government when it said that Qatar would make a big investment here. Our establishment also ridiculed the idea and would like to apologise for showing such little faith in our good friend Charilaos, who nevertheless will have to explain why the hotel will only be five-star… Comrade Tof had promised a seven-star hotel, so we are missing a couple of stars of luxury from the original plan.
This reduces the glamour rating of the project a bit but who would come to stay in a seven-star hotel on Nicosia’s most congested road anyway?
NOBODY can put a positive spin on events as well as Charilaos and he was bound to talk up the deal, which he said was the biggest ever direct investment in Kyproulla.
It is pretty impressive that a government which has proved totally inadequate at managing the economy could have attracted the biggest-ever investment from abroad. And the CEO of the Qatari state company undertaking the project declared that the investment was being made because “we believe in the economy of Cyprus”.
You won’t hear any Cypriot, apart from Charilaos, saying this after two years of the comrade’s mismanagement of the economy and three more to come, but what the hell. Our good friend, however, immediately seized the CEO’s assertion to trumpet that the deal was a show of confidence in our economy and that it would attract other investors from the Middle East.
After all, we could do with a few more hotels, apartment blocks and shopping centres…
WESTERN movies usually end with the hero bidding his farewells, getting on his horse and riding into the sunset, to the sound of sad country song. I thought of this when I saw pictures of Mehmet Ali Talat’s departure from the pseudo-presidential palace on Friday after handing over to Eroglu.
There are no horses nowadays, so Talat opted for a rather less elegiac exit – he got into his battered, old, Isuzu diplokambino and, with his wife by his side, drove off into the pseudo-sunset. Had he loaded the back of the diplokambino with his belongings, we would all be having a laugh at his lack of style and class.
But his exit was very rock‘n’roll. Leaving in the same old banger he had first arrived in showed not only admirable modesty but also a ‘don’t give a shit about my public image’ attitude which is very rare among our self-important, self-regarding politicians, for whom a flash car is one of the big attractions of power.
Mehmet Ali can count on my vote when he stands in the elections for the rotating presidency, thanks to his diplokambino exit. Respect.
THERE was another cause for celebration this week. A lawyer had been found guilty of professional negligence by the Supreme Court and made to pay €120,000 in damages to a British couple who had lost all the money they had paid to buy a plot of land.
The Paphos lawyer had sorted out the purchase contracts, but failed to notice that the plot had been mortgaged twice and could not have been transferred. Not surprisingly, the Paphos district court had ruled in favour of the Paphite lawyer, forcing the couple to take their case to the Supreme Court.
This will most certainly open the floodgates for cases against lawyers by foreign property buyers who feel they were stitched up. Nobody will be complaining as this also means more work for lawyers.
STAYING on legal matters, we were shocked to hear that the lawyer feted as a national hero after his Orams case triumph, was reported to the Disciplinary Committee of the Bar Association for allegedly soliciting clients.
I refer to our friend Constantis Candounas, who had publicly called on all refugees with property in the north to submit applications for compensation to the Immovable Property Commission as a way of proving that the Turks were incapable of offering a local remedy. This was a political stand more than attempt to solicit clients.
What was strange was that another well-known Nicosia lawyer, with ECHR experience, had made exactly the same call, in the same Politis article, in which Candounas was quoted, but was not reported. Someone out there obviously has it in for poor old Candounas, who, I hear, plans to be a candidate for Nicosia mayor in next year’s elections.
POLITICAL motives must have been behind this tale, because the Bar Association has never struck me as being too bothered about lawyers not maintaining high professional standards. If it was bothered, it would have barred dozens of lawyers from practising but from what I know, it has never taken such action. This is not because we have the most ethical, upstanding lawyers in the world.
The Association operates more like a union, protecting its members, than a professional body maintaining high ethical and professional standards among its members. If it maintained ethical standards and lawyers feared being struck off, they would not stitch up so many people. It would also have been consistent, instead of singling out Candounas.
Strangely, back in 2004, none of the no-voting lawyers encouraging refugees to apply to the ECHR were taken before the Bar Association’s disciplinary committee on suspicion of soliciting clients. The law office of DIKO deputy Andreas Angelides, alone, had submitted 369 cases to the ECHR but as it was for a worthy patriotic cause, the Association did not bother with a disciplinary investigation.
GOVERNMENT officials have been privately complaining about the Vatican’s security demands for Pope Benedict’s June visit to our sacred homeland. One development that may have escaped the Vatican’s security bosses, is that members of the British Territorial Army have recently joined UNFICYP.
The new arrivals are responsible for policing the buffer zone, and will therefore have the responsibility of guarding the Pope, who will be staying in the friary of Holy Cross Church, part of which lies in the buffer zone. But it seems nobody has informed the Vatican that UNFICYP’s Territorial Army volunteers manning the buffer zone are all fanatical Protestants from Northern Ireland, who are not known for their fondness of Catholics.
THE NEWLY-established Cyprus branch of the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators held a forum in Nicosia on Friday on the Cyprus Dispute Resolution. One of its members, a former judge, said that the Institute could offer a speedier and cheaper alternative for resolving disputes than the courts. He felt that parties in dispute from countries in the region could come to the Institute.
Who knows we might even become a regional centre for dispute resolution, given that we are so good at compromising and resolving differences in an amicable and civilised way. Just don’t mention the Cyprob, as it is not a dispute but an issue of invasion and occupation and of violation of human rights and international law.
A CUSTOMER alerted us to the following statement issued by the press officer of European Commissioner Androulla Vassiliou, after she was accused of not opposing GM food. “Contrary to media reports this week, European Commissioner A. Vassiliou did not vote in favour of authorising cultivation of the Genetically Modified Amflora potato.” Thank God for that.
LIMASSOL has always produced more right-wing reactionaries than any other town and the current flag-bearer of this fine tradition is DISY deputy Andreas Themistocleous. Ten days ago, Themistocleous decided to speak out against gay marriage after the ombudswoman had said the state needed to consider it.
Themistocleous responded thus: “By the same thinking, as we encounter paedophiles, practitioners of bestiality, necrophiliacs and criminals in our society, the State should accord them legalised recognition.”
OUR CELEBRATIONS continued yesterday with a big champagne bash for the sixth anniversary of the referendum, with a projection of the Ethnarch’s historic address on a big screen in the background. April 24, 2004 was the day Cypriot Hellenism heroically voted in favour of keeping the Cyprob industry going, thus safeguarding the careers of hundreds of lawyers and politicians who have been making an honest living from it for years.
