WITH ONLY a few weeks left in office and their puppet candidate having no chance of winning the elections, our clapped-out commie rulers, have come out of the closet, no longer bothering hiding their Stalinist mind-set.
AKEL’s apparatchiks at the Central Bank (CB) decided to step up their ongoing character assassination attempts against the former Governor Athanasios Orphanides, by bringing up, once again, the ridiculous matter of the hard disks, which they have insisted, he was keeping illegally.
On Tuesday, they sent one of the four big-muscled bodyguards Professor Panicos hired to protect him to Orph’s house in Lefkara to deliver a letter requesting the return of the two hard disks of the Central Bank lap-tops used by Orph.
The hard discs had been given to Orph with the agreement of the bank’s IT department, when he left last May, so he could carry on receiving personal correspondence that went to the bank’s server. This has been explained in public, but AKEL deputies and the CB apparatchiks insist on creating the impression that Orph was committing a crime by holding on to the discs.
On Wednesday the front page of the AKEL mouthpiece Haravghi carried a banner headline that read ‘The bailiff finds closed doors,’ explaining with big letters that “Orphanides refused to take delivery of letter requesting him to return immediately the hard discs he is holding on to.”
Orph refused to take delivery, because he was in the US, a point the newspaper put way down in the report, presenting it as a claim made by a member of his family that it did not believe.
THE MENTION of the word ‘bailiff’ (epidotis in Greek) in the headline created the impression that a court writ was being delivered, but it was nothing more than a letter from the Central Bank delivered by one of the Governor’s henchmen.
The members of the Orph family in the house were understandably afraid to open the door to the henchman, in what could only be seen as a form of harassment. In the past, letters from the CB were delivered to the law office representing Orph and it never refused to take delivery, so why this time was the letter delivered to the ex-Gov’s Lefkara home?
And how did Haravghi know the contents of the letter that was eventually slipped under the door by Professor Panicos’ muscleman? And who told the paper about the contents of the letter, which were supposedly private, considering the CB took the trouble to deliver it by hand?
The Governor’s office was quite clearly behind this stage-managed farce and subsequently informed Haravghi which did its best to present Orph as some kind of outlaw, refusing to accept a letter from a ‘bailiff’ and holding on to hard disks which it implied contained “secrets and highly confidential information,” needed by the investigation of Alvarez and Marsal.
If this were the case and Orph is behaving unlawfully, why has the CB not gone to the courts to secure an order for the return of the hard disks, instead of sending a Panic muscle to Lefkara, to deliver a letter when it knew Orph was several thousand miles away?
EVERYBODY knows that this pitiful farce was organised by the Governor’s office, but it is unclear whether his personal secretary, Elena Markadji, a stalwart Akelite who enjoys great power since the change of the CB regime, was acting on her own initiative, at the behest of the party, or on the instructions of Professor Panicos.
The professor had every reason to be pissed off with Orph because, during his recent visit the latter had alerted politicians to the skewed terms of reference for the PIMCO investigation of the banks’ financial needs, which were guaranteed to make the Cyprus debt unsustainable.
Realising that the CB representatives on the committee deciding the PIMCO terms of reference had agreed to assumptions and worst case scenarios that would push the banks’ re-capitalisation needs to unnecessarily high amounts, deputies demanded explanations from the professor. Had the CB gone out of its way to ensure the financial needs of the banks would be the highest possible so as to satisfy the government’s propaganda plans?
Deputies demanded an answer and called the professor to the House finance committee on Tuesday to examine ways of changing the methodology used by PIMCO, the final report of which is expected this week. The committee arranged to meet again, later in the day, with finance ministry and CB officials to explore ways of saving the situation, but Panicos did not take part. He may have been too busy dealing with the more important issue of Orph’s hard disks.
THE PROBLEM for the Professor is that he would look very stupid if he went back to the troika and demanded a change of PIMCO’s terms of reference and the of assumptions on which it was basing its investigation. After all his representatives on the steering committee had agreed to them, while the objections of the finance ministry officials were ignored.
So now he has realized he that the banks’ needs would make our debt unsustainable he hired another big consultancy firm, Black Rock, to carry out another investigation, in the hope it arrives at a lower recapitalisation figure which he could use to haggle with the troika. We wish him success, because we are all screwed if he fails, but we will know who to blame if he does.
In effect while the government was supposedly negotiating the best possible deal for public parasites with the troika, it had given instructions to the Central Bank to negotiate the worst possible deal for the banks. The government may have failed but the CB did not and will no doubt, blame the catastrophic consequences of its resounding success on Orph’s refusal to return the hard disks.
OUR AMBASSADOR to Washington, Pavlos Anastasiades received orders to return to Kyproulla next month because Tof the Terrible decided he does not like him. Anastasiades was posted to the Washington embassy in September 2010 and was not guilty of any disciplinary offence.
In fact Foreign Minister Erato Kozakou Marcoullis considered him a good ambassador and had three times ignored instructions from the comrade submit a proposal to the Council of Ministers for his transfer to Lefkosia. But the comrade is a stubborn man and on Wednesday ensured Erato obeyed his orders. A proposal for his transfer was submitted to last Wednesday’s Council of Ministers meeting and, not surprisingly, it was approved.
According to press reports, there were complaints that Anastasiades’ relations with the Cypriot expat community were non-existent. Other rumours were that the comrade was disappointed that he had failed to arrange for him to meet President Obama or at least vice-president Joe Biden. The truth is even if Nelson Mandela was our ambassador to Washington, the White House would not have invited Tof for a meeting with Obama.
The weirdest aspect of this story was that the decision was backed by a damning report against Anastasiades, written by Olympia Neocleous, his number two at the embassy. In our egalitarian, commie society the subordinate’s appraisal of the boss’ performance is what counts.
RUMOURS are that Anastasiades’ posting in Washington was cut short, because he fell foul of a leading member of the Cypriot community of the US – the Supreme President of the Cyprus Federation of America, Panicos Papanicolaou, who is a bosom buddy of the comrade.
Panicos, who currently faces charges of corruption and bribery of a public official in the US, was always photographed by the side of the comrade when the latter visited the US. During Tof’s last visit he took Panicos to a meeting with Jose Manuel Barroso, and all three were photographed together. Panicos had also taken Mr and Mrs Tof on holiday to a Greek island, a few years ago.
Anastasiades obviously did not have much time for the self-important Supreme P
resident, who likes to pose as an influential, string puller in the US, to naïve Cypriots whose taxes fund his resoundingly inconsequential Federation. Panicos will have complained to his buddy about the lack of respect shown to him by the ambassador. Ms Neocleous who sent the damning report against Anastasiades is close friends with the Supreme President.
But the real gripe Panicos has against Anastasiades was that he prevented Panicos’ construction company from landing a contract to fix our ambassador’s residence in Washington. Panicos had offered to do the job for two million bucks, but Anastasiades thought it was an extortionate price and notified Nicosia, which established that the job could have been done for half the amount Panicos was asking for.
He had to be punished for showing such disrespect to a leading member of the Cypriot community in the US.
DISY Fuhrer Nice Nik was on a super-high on Friday as he played host to heads of government who arrived in Limassol to attend the extraordinary summit of the European People’s Party. The guy was euphoric as he stood at the door of Le Meridien Hotel welcoming one European leader after another.
But the biggest smile was reserved for German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who seemed pretty pleased to see the fuhrer herself. Merkel who has been receiving a lot of negative press in Kyproulla as a result of her remark that we would get no special treatment for the bailout, openly supported Nik’s presidential candidacy, which could prove the kiss of death, given the prevailing anti-Kraut sentiments.
It will not be long before Nik’s rival candidates start claiming he is unsuitable for the presidency because he is supported by the evil Merkel. One weekly rag (see below) played this tune before she had even arrived.
IT WAS two years to the day, that Merkel last visited Kyproulla, making comrade Tof wet himself with joy. Her visit boosted his ego and increased his delusions of greatness; he subsequently boasted about his friendship with the German Chancellor.
This great friendship has obviously turned sour as Merkel did not even bother to pay him a courtesy visit while here. In fact when security measures for her visit were being discussed with DISY officials, the Germans had requested Merkel taken to Le Meridien in an armoured limo. The only one available was the comrade’s but the Germans declined the offer to use it.
Obviously, they feared that if Merkel accepted the use of the presidential limo she might have had to meet the comrade to thank him.
THE PALAZZO mouthpiece, weekly, hard-line commie rag Gnomi, gave an indication of how our government felt about Merkel’s recent remarks and German press allegations of money laundering in Kyproulla.
Its banner headline on Friday read, ‘Invasion by the Fourth Reich’ supported by a photo-montage of a well-known postcard of the Turkish invasion, featuring a nasty vicious-looking, gun-toting Turkish soldier stepping on the map of Cyprus. Merkel’s picture was super-imposed on the body of Turkish soldier.
The secondary headlines were also pretty fun: ‘Anastasiades and DISY open the gates’; ‘The Germans come again: ‘The European “Peoples” party with Merkel in the vanguard in clear involvement in our internal affairs’; ‘Without mercy, they want to impose neo-liberalism…’
FINANCE minister Vasos Shiarly undertook an initiative to deny allegations in the German press about money-laundering by Russian oligarchs in Kyproulla. He organised a team that included members of the Central Bank and the head of the serious fraud unit MOKAS and met EU ambassadors in order to persuade them that no money-laundering was taking place.
It was a commendable initiative by Shiarly, but he made one mistake. He took with him the head of MOKAS Eva Papakyriakou, whose presence will have undermined the message he was trying to get across. Ms Papakyriakou was the head of MOKAS when the Serbian people’s money was arriving in Cyprus in black bin bags for laundering services. She said and did nothing at the time.
ONLY 46 days left until the mentor of people called Panicos retires to his Kellaki dacha.
