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THE DAY after telling parliament the Church would not pay a cent in tax arrears, outspoken Archbishop Chrysostomos II yesterday said the tax issue was an effort to turn people against his institution.
“The issue is not financial. The issue is political,” Chrysostomos II told state radio. “They are resorting to populism to turn the people against the Church. But I told them many times, they are trying in vain.”
Chrysostomos II insists on sticking to an agreement made with the previous administration in 2006 that was never ratified.
Auditor general Chrystalla Yiorkadji has said that that agreement was unfavourable to the state.
AT LEAST Archbishop Chrysostomos II is showing consistency; from his uncompromising stance on the Cyprus problem, he remains equally uncompromising on paying the Church’s tax debts.
“We will not pay one cent; as long as I am Church leader, I will not consent to giving even one euro,” he defiantly announced during his ‘historic’ appearance at the House Watchdog Committee meeting.
He had been invited to the committee to give his position on the €169 million owed by the Church in tax arrears. These are all pre-1999 debts on capital gains and immovable property tax, of which €86 million are the interest charges.
THE GOVERNMENT needs to focus more on cutting public spending rather than increasing revenues if it is to meet its stability programme targets for reducing the public deficit, the European Commission (EC) said yesterday.
While welcoming the state’s willingness to bring the budget deficit down to below 3.0 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP) by 2013, Economic and Financial Affairs commissioner Olli Rehn said the government’s stability programme as submitted to the EC in April “aims to correct mainly by the revenue side, while expenditure is at a historically high level.”
THE E.C. announced yesterday that it has placed Cyprus – together with Bulgaria, Denmark, Finland and Luxembourg – under the excessive deficit procedure (EDP) set out in the Stability and Growth Pact, after the government notified the EC of a budget deficit of 6.1 per cent of GDP in 2009, and a public debt of 56.2 per of GDP on a rising trend.
Yesterday’s move means that 25 out of 27 EU member states are now under an ongoing EDP, the only exceptions being Estonia and Sweden.
A GOVERNMENT bill that will improve maternity leave laws has been prepared by the Labour Ministry.
According to the head of the Social Insurance Department, Theophanis Tryphonos, the proposed law is currently under evaluation by the Legal Services, after which it will be sent to the House for approval.
“The law for maternity leave, as well as the law for maternity benefits will change,” said Tryphonos, explaining that the move is part of a general plan to amend social insurance laws.
He explained that currently, a mother was entitled to 18 weeks paid maternity leave, under the condition that the relevant applications were submitted before the baby’s delivery. If an application was made after the delivery, she would be paid for 16 weeks.
THE CABINET is today expected to decide whether to approve a bill altering laws on the employment conditions for non-EU housemaids, providing among other things a five per cent increase of their minimum wage.
The increase translates into a €21 pay rise, bringing housemaids’ monthly salary up to €443 – and €300 if they have a live-in job – which is still half of Cyprus’ €887 minimum wage.
Apart from the salary raise, the bill seeks to introduce stricter criteria for issuing employment permits for overseas housemaids. While their minimum wage rise maintains the same working hours, employees will be asked to contribute to the relevant guarantees that have so far been paid solely by the employer.
THE FORMER Turkish Cypriot leader, Mehmet Ali Talat, may have left office but for the Republic of Cyprus’ Embassy in Spain, his legacy lives on.
According to media reports, Talat failed to pay his hotel and mini bar bill after he visited the Spanish Foreign Minister, Miguel Angel Moratinos during his election campaign.
After a two-hour meeting with Moratinos, he allegedly returned to Cyprus via Turkey without paying his bill.
The disgruntled hotel manager then contacted the Embassy of the Republic of Cyprus in Madrid to settle the bill.
Nearchos Palas, Cyprus Ambassador to Spain confirmed that he had received a request from the hotel manager, but sought to play down the incident.
THE BEST man of convicted rapist and murderer Antonis Prokopiou Kitas yesterday told the Nicosia district court that he had never witnessed his friend placing a bet or gambling during his stay at the Apollonion private hospital two years ago.
The witness, who has been a horse trainer for the past 30 years, told the court that he and Kitas struck up a friendship while the duo did a stint in prison the 1980s.
“We became friends and then family friends and I visited his home in Athienou,” the horse trainer said.
“Then in 1993, I think, he was jailed for life. We still maintained contact and I visited him in hospital. In the spring of 2006 he got married to his Chinese wife… He asked me to be his best man at their civil wedding in Aradippou.”
THE CYPRIOT wife of a 42-year-old Indian man who was yesterday remanded in four-day custody on suspicion of kidnapping and assaulting a fellow national has expressed her fury with police for detaining her husband.
The woman told the arresting officer that her husband had kidnapped no one but had simply apprehended a suspect on their behalf, who he delivered to their doorstep and instead of arresting the man responsible for an attack on their property they had arrested her husband.
“Instead of arresting a man who has three cases against him you let him go. And you [the court] say that my husband is going to leave the country when he has kids and they were crying all day yesterday,” the woman said.
The Cyprus Mail is the only English-language daily newspaper published in Cyprus. It was established in 1945 and today, with its popular and widely-read website, the Cyprus Mail is among the most trusted news sites in Cyprus. The newspaper is not affiliated with any political parties and has always striven to maintain its independence. Over the past 70-plus years, the Cyprus Mail, with a small dedicated team, has covered momentous events in Cyprus’ modern history, chronicling the last gasps of British colonial rule, Cyprus’ truncated independence, the coup and Turkish invasion, and the decades of negotiations to stitch the divided island back together, plus a myriad of scandals, murders, and human interests stories that capture the island and its -people. Observers describe it as politically conservative.
