TV DIVA Erini Charalambidou may have managed to sell herself off as a pioneering historical researcher – thanks to her show – to Akelites and other dimwits but she is having great difficulty promoting her bid for a parliamentary seat.
Erini, who is standing as a guest-star candidate for AKEL in the May elections, showed that she is a political loony in the Dr Matsakis tradition earlier this week when she published torrents of abuse against the Ethnarch’s family on her Facebook page.
Erini’s gloriously vicious outburst stayed on her page only for a few hours. Someone from the party, or a lawyer, must have advised her to take it off, as this was an unfit way for an AKEL candidate to behave. AKEL candidates have to be boring and uninteresting as individuals and avoid showing human emotions, except when they are talking about the coup and NATO.
The former variety show queen turned political pundit had lost her rag after Ethnarch Junior had said at a House Finance Committee meeting discussing the CyBC budget that Erini was still being paid by the corporation despite not showing up for work last month. He claimed that the AKEL-run CyBC gave preferential treatment to employees standing as party candidates, by allowing them to come and go as they pleased.
He also called on the board to make public the clocking-in cards of all staff so that the truth could be established. You wonder whether deputies have nothing better to do than to check whether employees at the CyBC do their working hours. If parliamentary control is to extend to working hours, it should cover the whole parasitic sector because picking on just the CyBC is discrimination.
THE FACEBOOK attack would have been given 10 out of 10 by the AKEL Central Committee if it had not been so personal, as it played the class war card to the full, pitting the filthy rich politician against a poor, defenceless worker.
Erini accused the mega-wealthy, privileged and well-connected Junior for “turning into a scandal the salary of a working woman. Note: the salary of a working woman became a scandal in Nicholas’ mind.” She then turned on the Ethnarch’s family.
“How the Papadopoulos family accumulated incredible wealth, on the backs of our fellow citizens, appears to leave Nicholas unmoved. And let me not hear the nonsense that what is lawful is also moral. It is not.”
The Marxist moralist added: “The Papadopoulos family exploited Tassos’ access to the country’s top posts, with the result that such wealth was collected in the hands of one family – I stress, one family – making all the rest of us feel like paupers; or idiots, or both. This is probably how the royalty of Strakka must have viewed us.”
As for Junior, she wondered if he had ever worked in his life. “He lived with the security of having the big law firm of millions waiting for him.” And now the privileged rich boy was making false and misleading accusations against her in order to get attention, she wrote.
But were the accusations made by the Strakka prince false and misleading? It is a common secret that Erini had not shown up for work in the last month, but she had a good excuse – Tassos’ family is fabulously wealthy.
THE FALSE and misleading accusations were in fact pretty accurate as the defender of the poor and destitute eventually admitted in a statement on Thursday, two days after her Facebook offensive on the Ethnarch’s clan.
She said she had stayed away from work because she was facing a serious health problem and was saddened that some were “exploiting human suffering for personal gain.” Why did neither she nor the CyBC chairman who has been defending her, not mention the human suffering from the start and waited for three days before providing a half-plausible excuse for her absence from work?
Had she been away from work for a month without informing anyone that she was on sick leave? All the questions would have been answered, I presume, at a news conference that Erini called for yesterday, despite saying in her Thursday statement that she would not talk about the matter again. (This was written before the news conference and we therefore do not know what she said)
THE ATTACK on the Ethnarch’s family came as a bit of a surprise considering Erini was a big Tassos fan in the past and had never expressed any moral disgust about his unbelievable riches. Of course, she was not Rosa Luxembourg back then but just another TV Barbie doll looking for fame.
The comrades were obviously not happy with her and got the spokesman to say that it (the party??) did not agree with the “personal references made”. How could it agree? It had made the guy with the incredible wealth president and worshipped the floor he spat on for four-and-a-half years.
More concern for the comrades is that the new Rosa is a loud-mouthed individualist who could cause major embarrassment to the party. The members of the AKEL politburo, none of whom wanted her as a candidate, have now seen their worst fears come true.
So why did the party make her a candidate? Because comrade president Tof decided he wanted her on the AKEL election ticket and his opinion is the only one that counts in the party of which he stopped being the leader more than two years ago. Disagreeing with comrade Tof is not permitted in the party which struggled so much and made so many sacrifices for democracy.
UNION bosses never miss an opportunity to moan in public about rising unemployment figures and the ruthless capitalists constantly plotting to shaft the workers. It is the familiar, antiquated rhetoric which, conveniently, ignores the contribution of arrogant and inflexible union bosses in causing unemployment.
Several restaurants have closed down, adding to unemployment numbers, because of union inflexibility over working hours. One Nicosia restaurateur is currently in dispute with a union because it objects to flexible working hours. He wants staff to work longer hours at the weekend when the restaurant is at its busiest and shorter hours on a couple of weekdays when business is down.
But the union will hear nothing of it, insisting that there should be the same number of staff on Tuesdays when the restaurant is one third full and they have no work to do, as on Saturday when it is full the owner would have to hire extra staff. As if this would happen at a time when most restaurants are struggling to stay afloat. There is a much bigger probability that the restaurant would close down and all jobs lost, but union bosses are just too stupid to realise it.
THE STEAK & CO restaurant, on the Gavrielides traffic lights in Nicosia, was recently bought by a Russian businessman, who brought in two Italians, a chef and a manager, to run the joint.
Once the Italians decided a work timetable for waiters and kitchen staff the union rep arrived to tell them that things did not operate in this way in Cyprus. They had wanted staff to work for three hours at lunch-time, leave and return in the early evening to complete their hours, but the union rep said this was unacceptable.
Staff had to work continuous working hours, even if they had nothing to do for four of those hours, between sittings. This absurd arrangement also meant that the restaurant needed a bigger number of employees to operate. ‘You either operate under these conditions or you do not open,’ said the smart union rep and left it at that.
The next day Steak & Co did not open. It stayed closed for about two weeks and from what we heard, it hired new staff before re-opening, even though the union did everything in its power to take back its old staff.
Weird how union bosses’ efforts to protect jobs result in pushing up unemployment figures, but they are too dumb to realise that they are doing something wrong.
OUR GOVERNMENT has also helped boost unemployment figures. Last year, the union rep masquerading as a labour minister, at a time of recession and rising unemployment, raise the minimum wage. That was a really smart way to encourage businesses to start employing staff again.
One big employer who ventured into our establishment for a quick metrios moaned that the minimum wage in Cyprus was higher than in the UK when you added 13th salary etc. “What hope is there for the economy recovering with this bunch of amateurs running the country,” he asked.
There is a government policy to help the economy recover – digging up roads. Never before in the history of the Republic have so many roads, in so many towns, been so dug up.
THE LAST hopes of the Qatari deal being implemented appear to have been dashed in Cyprus airspace on Tuesday morning when our principled government refused to allow two Qatari fighter jets and a cargo plane to land for refuelling at the old Larnaca airport.
Our government had decided that Kyproulla would not be used as a staging post for air attacks on Libya, and stuck to its anti-western principles, taking the same neutral line as our closest ally, mother Russia. In the end the government was obliged to put aside its principles and allow the Qatari jets to land and refuel, because the pilots said they were very low on fuel; under international conventions we could not turn the planes away.
It was strange how the Qatari jets were flying on a combat mission without adequate fuel in their tank. Do they operate like cars that stop at a petrol garage on the way somewhere and tell the pump attendant, fill it up, check the tyre pressure and send the bill to the Sheikh?
WHAT happens to the Qatari project after our unfriendly stance? I bet the Sheikh will not be too willing to spend a cent here after the way we treated his jets. Then again, the comrade made it very clear that our country opposed the bombing of Colonel Gaddafi’s forces and would be not be a party to it. He should tell the Qataris in no uncertain terms that we do not want the money of a country that sided with the evil Western powers and was dropping bombs on poor old Gaddafi.
That would be a principled stand.
MANY people were shocked to hear that during the police raid on the vice-den in old Nicosia, a 15-year-old Chinese girl was found. This gave rise to speculation that underage girls were being pushed into prostitution and that some of the customers of the brothel were paedophiles, who deserved to have their balls cut off.
This would have been an appropriate punishment if this were actually the case. We have learnt however that the teenage girl was the daughter of the suspected madam, known as Nancy, and was at the house because she lived there with her mother. The police should have investigated the matter before telling the media that a teenage girl was among those arrested.
I mention this in order to put the record straight as it would be unfair to label all the dirty old (and young) men who buy sexual services as paedophiles. As there is no Pancyprian Association of Prostitute Customers to defend its members’ reputation, we felt obliged to undertake this thankless task, despite the fact that it will not win us any friends.
AS WE ARE in the mood for putting the record straight, we must admit that we had been completely misled by one of our informers last week. We had reported that the accounting firm Kyprianides, Nicolaou and Associates had represented the government in negotiations with Noble Energy in the drafting of the contract for drilling at plot 12. We understand that this was not the case and would like to apologise for the mistake. We assure the accounting firm that the person who passed on the information has been very cruelly dealt with.
