HOW DOES a bill of €170 million in tax arrears to the Inland Revenue Department become €170,000 from one day to the next? You divide by 1,000 or multiply by 0.1 per cent.
This is the difficult way of doing it. There is a much easier way as we found out this week. The Auditor-general admits that she had mistakenly concluded in her annual report that the Church owed the IRD €170 million in taxes. She blames the IRD for giving her the wrong figures and presto 170 million becomes 170 thousand.
No division necessary – all that is required is an IRD that is run by a bunch of village idiots who could be blamed for getting their calculations wrong by 169,830,000.
Our good friend Charilaos made the understatement of the year, when he said: “It appears that the amount of 170 million euro, to a large extent, might not correspond to reality.” To a large extent? The amount could not have been more emphatically, embarrassingly and completely wrong.
And I liked the meek admission that it “might not correspond to reality”.
Being wrong by 169,830,000 should command a more assured statement than this. The figure does not correspond to someone’s wildest imagination.
Anonymous sources at the IRD told *Alithia* newspaper: “We do not make mistakes. There is a perfectly reasonable explanation for what has seen the light of publicity.” She did not elaborate, but we look forward to the reasonable explanation that, to a large extent, might not correspond to reality.
THE INCOMPETENCE of the IRD gave Archsbishop Chrys 2 the opportunity to perch himself on a moral summit and do his self-righteousness gig. “I was saying and I stated it on many occasions lately, the issue was not one ofeconomics but of populism,” he said.
He called on the government to sign the deal of 2005, settling all money differences between state and Church and starting with a clean slate. “If you do not want to do this, I state unequivocally that I will not pay a single euro, I do not recognise that I owe anything to the state and if you have the law come and get it. That was my decision, it is final and nothing will ever change it.”
And he would not stop there. If the deal was not signed the state will have to return money paid to it by bishoprics over the last 30 years, on the values of real estate that “did not correspond to reality”. The bishoprics should never have made these payments the vindicated Chrys insisted.
He advised the IRD not to bother to try to evaluate the thousands of pieces of property the Church owned and impose immovable property tax. Such a task would take years to complete and it would be a waste of time and money anyway. He eloquently said this would be a case of “beating the air and making a hole in the water”.
The reason – “The Church, by decision of the Holy Synod, will not pay; it refuses to pay.” As TV hacks would say, Chrys sent a clear message – screw the state, screw the law and screw the Inland Revenue Department which can take my tax debt and shove it – that every one of us would have liked to utter publicly at some point.
I WOULD not attribute this bravado to Chrys having bigger and heavier cojones than the rest of us or to his horkatos’ chutzpah. He is being defiant from a position of total safety – he knows he is legally protected by a provision in the constitution, inserted by another devilishly, devious monk with Paphite roots – Makarios.
The Kyproulla constitution does not exempt the Church from paying taxes on its assets, but the Makarios provision deprives the state of the power to collect any tax dues from it. While IRD can demand payment of tax dues, if the Church refuses to pay it has no way of collecting the money.
The Makarios provision does not allow the state to seize assets of the Church in settlement of tax debts without the written approval of the monastery or bishopric which owes the money. As no bishop or monastery boss would sign, the state cannot collect the Church’s tax debts.
So it does not really matter if it owed the IRD 170 billion, million or thousand euro, the state ain’t getting a cent.
A FEW DAY before Chrys’ two-fingered salute to the government, the comrade president attended the ceremony to celebrate the inauguration of the new Church charter, which contained good news for all potential sugar-daddies of the Orthodox faith, who would like to marry their nubile bimbo in Church.
The Charter has extended the maximum age difference between a couple, for a church marriage, to 25 years. While this is a step forward, the Pancyprian Association of Greek Orthodox Middle-aged Men (PAGOMM), believes the provision does not go far enough as it could force many of its members to needlessly live in sin.
In the age of Viagra, the Nashi pear (a powerful aphrodisiac according to the CyBC) plastic surgery and eternal youth the Church should allow a man to marry a woman young enough to be his grand-daughter. As Groucho Marx said,you are as young as the woman you feel.
THE COMRADE gave the gathered fathers of the Church a moral tip taken straight from the Bible during the Charter ceremony. “The person who has two shirts should give one to his neighbour,” he told the priests who restrained themselves from laughing. This is a biblical anachronism. In this day and age a person who has just two shirts, is very poor and should hold on to both of them. A person with two houses – let’s say, one in Nicosia and one in Kellaki – however, could give one to his neighbour if he is a true Christian communist.
HEADS of State and Church also rubbed shoulders last Sunday at the glitzy IV Cyprus-Russia Gala that took place in plush gardens of the palazzo de la popolo in Nicosia. With tickets priced at €150, this is the most expensive bash of the year, even though the profits go to the Radiomarathon charity.
Many of the guests get their tickets for free as the two big banks and a couple of Russian companies that sponsor the event buy quite a few which are distributed among employees and clients. There was a good turnout for the event, scheduled to start at 8pm. Most people arrived after nine, which meant everything was delayed, including the serving of the nosh, which begun after 10.
Chrys 2 managed to stay awake for the comrade’s welcoming speech, delivered in good Russian, but he begun nodding off when the food was being served. He left before the dessert was served.
In his speech, the comrade waxed lyrical about the event’s main sponsor, Interros which “illustrated its high values of social sensitivity”. He also awarded a medal to the President of Interros, Russian oligarch Vladimir Potanin, who in the 2008 Forbes list of the world’s billionaires was number 25 with a net worth of 19.3 billion bucks.
The comrade said nothing about “the person with two shirts” in his eulogy of Potanin, who is much wealthier than our Church.
THE ENTERTAINMENT was pretty impressive, featuring classical, folk, jazz and pop music plus a modern dance ensemble. The star attraction however was Greek pop singer Antonis Remos, who was performing until 2 am causing a major disturbance for residents of the area around the palazzo.
It was a Sunday night and people needed to sleep because they had to work the next day, but when the comrade is partying there is no need for consideration. If it were any other person disturbing the peace after midnight, the cops would have been round there like a shot to demand the music was turned down.
But a person who called the Strovolos police station to complain about the noise was told that there was nothing the cops could do about it.
SPEAKING of cops, I am starting to suspect that the members of our Drug Squad are all out of their heads on potent, mind-altering drugs. What other explanation could there be for their Olympian incompetence?
The latest story to hit the new
s was a gem. A Squad informer told the cops that he had been asked to import 12kg of cannabis from Amsterdam by a Limassol dealer. Drug Squad officers helped him get through Larnaca airport customs and drove him to Nicosia. When the drop-off was arranged, some place in Aradippou, Drug Squad members waited in order to pounce. The recipient drove his white BMW into two Squad cars that tried to block him and fled the scene, having injured three cops who were in one of the cars crashed into in order to escape.
According to Politis there was a similar incident, a couple of months ago. The Drug Squad staked out a place between Paphos and Limassol where 8kg of cannabis had been left for someone to pick up. The guy picked the package of drugs up and managed to escape with the bag despite the attempts by the cops to stop him.
They were not capable of following him as he fled the scene in an old banger. Cannabis users of the island should say a big thank-you to the Squad for ensuring safe delivery of 18kg of pot to the market.
PAPHITE minister of health Christos Patsalides’ campaign to destroy the American Heart Institute was explained in an excellent series of reports carried by Alithia in the last week. According to the report, a Council of Ministers decision last year gave the self regarding Paphite absolute power in deciding where each patient applying for state help should go for treatment.
The new regulations stipulated that the health minister could listen to a patient’s preference but he would have final say over where the patient would be treated. Now what sane government would give such powers to a complex-ridden, vindictive Paphite, who had been going out of his way to prevent patients from going for heart operations to the Institute? Even a member of the Drug Squad would have known it would be a monumental blunder to give such powers to a man who was certain to abuse it.
This raises suspicions that the comrade president is fully behind Pats’nasty campaign to destroy the AHI. There is a motive as well. During the election campaign, the comrade put together a list of professionals and intellectuals who endorsed his candidacy. He asked one of the top doctors at the AHI to sign the declaration of support but the latter politely declined. The Institute may now be paying the price for this error of judgement. The comrade, according to those who know him, neither forgives nor forgets.
THE HEAD of news at the CyBC Yiannis Kareklas appears to have picked up our idea for a celebration of the anniversary of the Cyprob, in conjunction with the 50th anniversary the Republic, festivities.
In his Thursday show Proektasis, he said that he would be hosting shows examining all the proposals for a solution of the Cyprob, since 1947. If Kareklas thinks that shows on the de-Cuellar guidelines, the Ghali set of ideas etc are going to make audiences tune into his Thursday evening show, he should apply for a job as head of the Drug Squad.
But if the first Cyprob proposal was in 1947, then this year we should be celebrating the 63rd anniversary of the Cyprob which is much older than the Republic.
SELF-REGARDING legal eagle Christos Clerides was a guest on Kareklas’ Thursday night show, which was discussing the property issue. Clerides, a vociferous campaigner against the A-plan, disagreed with two guests who were arguing that we should make compromises in order to reach a deal, because the passing of time was working against us.
In response to this line of argument, Clerides said: “This country has a history of nine millennia. You cannot view the Cyprus problem in a period of 30, 40 years and be in a hurry because with this logic we would still have the Soviet Union, the racist regime of South Africa would still exist and so forth.
“We must remain committed to our target of getting rid of the Turkish yoke and not think because some time has passed we must rush to solve the Cyprus problem at all costs.” Nine thousand years of existence, I think gives us the right to view the Cyprob in a period of a couple of centuries before we seriously think about a solution.
Shame Clerides will not be around, to gloat that his super-smart recommendation was proved correct.
