BEFORE we start we would like to wish, without a hint of irony, all our customers a happy, prosperous, exciting, intellectually and sexually satisfying year in which they achieve all their objectives and also find the time to go to Church and pray for a fair and lasting, Cypriot solution to the Cyprob that would allow all people – GCs, TCs, Maronites, Armenians, Latins, EU nationals and legal immigrants – to live together in peace and harmony.
It might come across as a little mean-spirited, but we need to mention that our wishes do not extend to illegal immigrants, asylum seekers and political refugees, or Turkish settlers and Turkish occupation troops whose return to their respective countries of origin would make us all much happier. We would also like to make it clear that we do not wish public parasites, multi-pensioners and semi-state workers a prosperous year, because if it is, the economy would be even deeper in the merde than it is now.
In fact a professionally disappointing year for the greedy, miserable bosses of the blood-sucking public sector unions would be extremely beneficial to our economy and would help the recovery we are all hoping for in 2011.
That’s the ‘goodwill to everyone’ nonsense out of the way. This festive season pressure to be nice and generous is soul-destroying, but at least we do not have to do it again for 12 months.
We deserve gratitude for supporting the German car industry
ON THE OTHER hand, it is nice to start the new year on a positive note. And that is how the comrade president will be starting it, hosting the first ever official visit to Kyproulla by a head of the German government.
Angela Merkel arrives on the island of victims and hereditary refugees on Tuesday for a six-hour official visit, described by some as a stopover. It remains unclear whether the six hours would include her travelling time from Larnaca airport to the capital and back.
This is a very short visit when you consider she would be arriving here immediately after a two-day visit to Malta that is much smaller in size and population and is nowhere near as big a nuisance to the EU as Kyproulla. Surely we deserved a longer visit than Malta, as a show of gratitude for the support we have been giving the German car industry; a meeting with taxi-drivers would have been a nice gesture.
Everyone has been asking about the purpose of the visit, but nobody has been able to enlighten us, the German ambassador restricting himself to diplomatic niceties and generalities at a news conference he gave on Wednesday. Will she be inviting us to join the core of Euro-zone countries, ask for our help in blocking Turkey’s EU accession course or demand a speedy closure of the Cyprob?
Another guess is that she is here about the amelopoulia. Kyproulla and Malta are the only two EU countries whose citizens still catch and eat this endangered species and Merkel’s visits may be ambelopouli-related.
WHATEVER the purpose, our comrade president cannot be denied his well-deserved bragging rights for securing yet another high-profile visit. In less than a year he will have hosted visits by the Pope, President Medvedev and now Chancellor Merkel. It is an impressive record that would help his quest for recognition as world statesman.
In an interview the aspiring comrade statesman gave to the Germany-Cyprus magazine recently, he was asked ‘what present would you bring your wife from Germany’ and he gave the following answer: “A small statue of Karl Marx, who in these days is very topical, as well as works by the great German composers.”
Mrs Christofia is very lucky to be married to such a romantic chap, but I am surprised that the presidential household does not already possess several small statues of Karl Marx. Unless the present would be for their bedroom; statues of Marx are said to work wonders for the love life of communist couples.
Hopefully, embassy staff will have briefed the Chancellor’s office and Merkel will bring a statue of Marx as an official gift, even though she is not a great fan of the man, having grown up and worked in the socialist hell of East Germany.
RELATIONS with Germany have come a long way since the days of the late, great Spy Kyp, who had caused a major diplomatic incident in 1978, when he accused the late Paul Kurbjuhn, a diplomat at the West German embassy in Nicosia of being involved in a plot to overthrow him.
The irrepressible Spy was going through his loony phase at the time, and claimed, quite seriously, that he had uncovered a conspiracy to topple him and impose an unjust solution of the Cyprob. Among the conspirators, were an Israeli football coach, a former prostitute-turned-princess and an EOKA B man-turned-hotelier, while the ‘brain’ behind it all was supposedly Tassos Papadopoulos.
Kurbjuhn was accused by the paranoid Spy of taking orders from Franz Josef Strauss, the leader of Germany’s right-wing Christian Social Union Party and subsequently minister-president of Bavaria. This loony episode caused outrage in Bonn which considered severing diplomatic ties with Kyproulla.
Strauss featured as string-puller in the conspiracy because of lousy intelligence gathering. Spy had someone monitoring the movements of the EOKA B hotelier Kikis Constantinou, who at the time had a dog called Strauss. The rest is history.
OUR ESTBALISHMENT rarely agrees with anything the EUROKO chief Demetris Syllouris says, but on the issue of the supply of LNG, we cannot disagree with his claim that the deal struck constituted the ‘scandal of the century’. If signed it would certainly be in the running for the stupidest decision of the century, even of the millennium.
The setting up of the LNG land terminal in Vassiliko, at a cost of €800 million, would be the most expensive state project undertaken in the history of Kyproulla and the funny thing is, we do not even need it. We could have natural gas delivered directly to power stations by a contractor who would undertake all the costs of the operation. And this could be done through a five- or 10-year contract, instead of the 20-year contract proposed by the Natural Gas Public Company (DEFA). However the Electricity Authority (EAC) would need a 20-year contract in order to recoup its €800m investment in the folly of the land terminal. Knowing how majestically incompetent state organizations are in managing big projects, the cost would probably exceed a billion euro. A billion euro for something we do not need.
POLITICIANS, apart from the comrade’s loyal poodles at AKEL, have been disparaging the deal, citing the existence of large reserves of natural gas under the sea surrounding the island. We could have our own natural gas in five years time, so why sign a contract for 20 years? And why did the government not consider the other offers submitted for the supply of compressed natural gas that would have cost us several billions less?
The reason is because our deputies, in December 2007, passed a law setting up DEFA and giving it a monopoly for supplying LNG to the EAC land terminal which would de-liquefy it and deliver it to the power stations. The contract that our deputies have been lambasting was in full compliance with the stupid law they voted for in 2007. The only man to speak out against the law at the time was Averof Neophytou, but not even his own party paid any attention to him, because he was excessively rational.
Thanks to the wise law, it would be illegal to use anything other than LNG supplied by DEFA to the EAC’s land terminal when it is finally completed.
THE GOVERNMENT, which loves to squander the taxpayer’s cash and is a committed supporter of badly-run, wasteful state organizations, has been defending this insane project in its traditional Stalinist style – insisting that its critics did not have the right to express an opinion.
Academics who questioned the wisdom of the project represented the interests of big multi-nationals we were told. As for the politicians, they had no right express opinions because they were not experts, we were told by the comrade president, the government spokesman, our ultra-smart commerce minister and the AKEL chief. As if you needed any expertise to conclude that this project was a monument to complete stupidity.
But who is the renowned expert who came up with the idea of the land terminal and the LNG monopoly? The man whose expert judgment should not be questioned by ignorant politicians and dishonest academics? It is the highly-educated EAC union boss Andreas Panorkos, a world expert on energy issues. He drafted the insane LNG law and threatened strike action if it were not approved.
With presidential elections just two months away, our pathetically pitiful political parties bowed to Panorkos’ expertise at blackmail and approved his law. Our energy policy has been dictated by some poorly-educated, union dim-wit, but only ‘energy experts’ are allowed to question his crap judgment.
THE DEAR old Bank of Cyprus threw a big lunch just before Christmas to which all the members of the media were invited. The guests included big-shot TV owners and publishers as well as lowly reporters. The chairman, Aristo developer, made a little speech in which he kept boasting about the B of C’s high profitability and wonderful prospects.
This was rather insensitive, not to say provocative, considering how the media had been struggling to make ends meet in the last couple of years. Trust a nouveau riche Paphite like Aristo developer not to realise that it is in poor taste to boast about your wealth to your less well-off guests, especially when your bank is charging them extortionate interest on their loans as well.
THE OFFSITE web newsletter informed us last Monday that 2011would be its year. Information via the internet was spreading fast, it wrote, and Offsite had become “in a few months the biggest, independent ‘voice’ on a daily basis, increasing its readers daily.” The owners of Offsite should go easy on the boasting because it is not a great achievement to take news stories from the morning newspapers, summarise them, add a predictable opinion to each one and then claim that you are offering a unique service.
Was it a coincidence that on Friday when there were no newspapers, the Offsite newsletter featured no news but was exclusively about cars? Does the “biggest independent voice on a daily basis” go silent on the days that newspapers are not published?
AKEL football club Omonia, like our state, has run out of money. Like our state, Omonia was paying its employees obscenely high wages, but suddenly it has run out of funds and unlike our state, it has told its players to accept pay cuts or look for another employer.
So desperate has the situation become that the AKEL chief Andros Kyprianou contacted the B of C to request a generous donation for Omonia. He probably heard Aristo’s boasts that the bank was swimming in money and decided to try his luck. We do not know what the bank replied, but I was rather disappointed that a committed commie like Andros would seek the help of a greedy bank. He would hardly be in a position to turn the bank down if Aristo goes to him asking for a political favour.
If I were the B of C chairman I would tell him to take the money he needs for Omonia out of the super- tax imposed by his comrade boss on all the banks, instead of begging for help from a capitalist organization which routinely screws the poor.
