By Patroclos
ANOTHER two men entered AKEL’s Hall of Heroes last week, after they were arrested in connection with the Dromolaxia land scam. The two achieved martyrdom among their comrades as soon as they were arrested for questioning by the cops on Wednesday, portrayed as victims of what party chief Andros described as a ‘political frame-up’.
By Thursday the martyrs had attained hero status, with an AKEL mob gathering outside Larnaca court and applauding their arrival. One of the suspects, the party’s financial controller with the wonderful Akelite name Venizelos Zannetos, waved to the admiring mob like some persecuted revolutionary, before entering the court.
On Friday, AKEL’s weekly rag Gnomi, described the pair (the other heroic suspect was Christos Alekou, member of the politburo) as ‘political prisoners’ while mouthpiece Haravghi tried to rally the masses against the ‘filthy war’ aimed at ‘crushing the party morally and intellectually’.
Later on the same day the heroic ‘political prisoners’ were visited in their cells by their great, former leader, comrade Tof, who offered solidarity and told them to hang on in there until their exoneration.
According to allegations made by businessman Nicos Lillis, who was giving out the backhanders, the commie pair had been blackmailing him to extract party donations from him, supposedly threatening to pull the plug on the CyTA project he was handling, if he did not give generously.
The amounts he paid were supposedly in the region of 800 grand, but this was not bribery, it was a donation to the party. As Andros would say, there was nothing reprehensible when corruption was for the sake of the party or the football club you love.
WHAT it all boils down to is that Akelites have always believed that because they are angelic commies, always striving for the good of the workers, they were above the law. So when the committee investigating the Mari explosion issued its report the party immediately rubbished it. When Tof went to the investigative committee for the economy he refused to answer any questions as everyone else had done because he felt that as former president he deserved special treatment.
Now that the attorney-general has ordered the detention of two commie officials the party is convinced it is a set-up and an attack on AKEL. Justice had been politicised claimed Andros and declared that his two comrades were innocent.
I do not know why we bother having a justice system at all. Why don’t we just scrap the courts and send all suspected criminals to Andros who could decide within a couple of minutes their guilt or innocence. The courts’ backlog would be cleared in a couple of weeks and anyone who donated money to the party would be found innocent.
POLITICAL parties’ reaction to the arrest of the red heroes was pretty subdued because it’s a classic case of those in glass houses. You’d have to be a real simpleton to believe only AKEL took backhanders in the form of donations from businessmen having dealings with the state or SGOs.
All parties are at it, but the commies are such bungling incompetents that, even after so many years’ experience, they are still messing up, accepting payment by cheque and issuing receipts as well. They are such dim-wits they still have not learnt the golden rule of the corruption code of ethics – cash payments only.
COMRADES knew, however, of the other rule of the code – blame your accusers of corruption – and tried to turn the tables on interior minister Socratis Hasikos who had ordered the investigation into the Dromolaxia scam.
“Hasikos should explain where the tens of millions of backhanders from the scandal of the S300 (missiles), which everyone was talking about at the time, had ended up.”
Hasikos was not defence minister at the time of the purchase of the weapons of mass commissions but if the commies know something, they should speak out. They will not because, on big purchases all parties took a piece of the action regardless of which party was in government.
Then came the cheapest shot of all, asking Hasikos why he had never taken a stand against the 1974 coup.
OUR MOLE at the palazzo informed us that a couple of days before the arrests, which everyone knew were imminent, Akelite officials had contacted a member of Prez Nik’s inner circle to propose a compromise. The commies would give Nik full support in his handling of the Cyprob as long as the police did not arrest any party members.
The palazzo’s response was negative, so the morning after Alekou and Zanettou were arrested, Andros went on a CyBC radio show and expressed his dissatisfaction with Nik’s reference to the ‘evolving transformation of the Cyprus Republic’ as this gave the impression of acceptance of Turkish positions for an evolving federation.
The Central Committee also issued a statement castigating this treachery, in case the prez was not listening to the radio when Andros had fired his warning shot.
PREZ NIK announced the comeback of the Cyprob soap opera, appropriately, in a televised news conference on Wednesday evening, but the AKEL arrests, earlier in the day stole his thunder. This suited him, because the salesmen of bash-patriotism would not be able to attract anyone’s attention with their shock-horror reaction.
Nik was ultra-careful not to say anything that could have been interpreted as over-eagerness for a settlement. Instead he stuck to his mantra about the need for thorough preparation and assured everyone that talks with Ankara would not lead to a four-party meeting, which all parties are rabidly opposed to. They are against it because, according to the EDEK spokesman, the four-party meeting was a long-standing Turkish demand. It must be bad for us if the Turks support it.
The highlight of Nik’s performance was his assurances that natural gas would not play a part in the talks. He omitted to mention that if there was no natural gas, there would be no talks.
WHEN the committee to investigate the causes of the collapse of the economy was appointed, our establishment pointed out that this was a complete waste of time. We had authoritatively announced that the causes of the collapse could all be traced back to the village idiot who was autocratically mismanaging the country for five years. We were proved correct.
A leaked copy of the committee’s findings said: “The first and main person responsible for the situation which the economy of the country ended up in, on the brink of bankruptcy, was the former president of the Republic.” Very enlightening indeed.
The “first and main person responsible” issued a self-righteous, written statement to defend himself on Friday. He said: “It is at least unheard of, if not a practice that embarrasses Cyprus internationally, apart from a blow to democracy, for some judges to judge the elected president of the republic and the government.”
I may be wrong, but I think nothing could be a bigger, international embarrassment (or more catastrophic) for the country than having a bona fide village idiot as the elected president of the republic and the government.
PARTY of high principles DICKO has managed to double its membership in the last few months as it prepares for the December 1 leadership contest, between incumbent Marios Garoyian and his ultra-ambitious challenger Ethnarch Junior.
There are currently 19,104 membership applications that the party needs to process and add to its existing 21,000 members. This surge of members has nothing to do with the party’s principled positions on the Cyprob or its traditional commitment to rusfeti (especially now the public sector is not hiring).
The two candidates have been signing up new members in order to maximise their votes in the leadership elections. Junior had done this openly, through political gatherings and press advertisements, whereas the sly Marios had a sales team sneakily signing up members. Press reports suggested he has signed up a lot more members than Junior
Nobody should be surprised if a few hundred Pakistani, Sri Lankan and Filippino DICKO members turn up to vote for the shifty Marios, who has also signed up quite a few DISY supporters that hate Junior.
ONE ELDERLY DISY supporter, known to our establishment, was approached by Garoyian’s recruiters and asked to join the party and vote in the leadership elections. He was told that the €10 membership fee would be paid by the team and on election-day he would be picked up from his home, taken to DICKO HQ to vote and then dropped back at his home. He signed the membership application form immediately.
The question our customers were asking was whether daily Phil has also applied for DICKO membership considering its open support for Junior and its constant digs against poor old Marios, whose principled opportunism is so often misunderstood. Phil may want to punish him because in the last elections he sold DICKO’s votes to Nik instead of to the paper’s darling, Yiorkos Lillikas.
SPEAKING of Phil, the recession appears not to have tempered its proprietor’s quest for Kyproulla media domination.
Having started publishing a new daily in June he has now reached an agreement with the Church to take over the running of the commercial department of the Church’s struggling TV station Mega. The holy fathers have run out of lolly and can no longer provide the funds to keep the station going.
Phil’s boss probably saw this as an opportunity to add a TV station to his extensive media holdings eventually and has reportedly agreed to cover Mega’s payroll as part of the commercial agreement. In better times, the Church had been a generous backer of Phil, so it is quite touching that now its station is in deep trouble the publisher has very kindly come to its rescue.
STAYING on religious matters, staff at the Sunday Mail was wondering this week whether the Larnaca post office’s return of a newspaper mailed to Imam Shakir, the Muslim cleric in charge of the Hala Sultan Teke was religiously motivated.
The post office did an Elvis and returned to sender, with the stamped explanation, ‘insufficient address’. The ‘insufficient address’ was the following: Hala Sultan Tekke, Dromolaxia, Larnaca. Are there so many mosques in Dromolaxia that the postman would not know at which one to deliver the mail? Unless there are AKEL plans to sell the Tekke to CyTA and everyone is pretending it does not exist.
THE PRIM and proper director general of the CyBC Themis Themistocleous has the look of someone that is a stickler for detail. A few months ago, he patronisingly told a Cyprus Mail journalist that his report about the corporation was inaccurate because he had referred to the CyBC as the ‘state broadcaster’.
The paper obviously carried on using the above description because on Friday the pompous Themis sent a letter of complaint to the editor. “I would request you that you prefer using the correct term ‘Public Broadcaster’ instead,” he advised. I do not know whether the editor has replied, but if she has not, my suggestion is to write back: “I would request that you get a life.”
THE INTRODUCTION of the new working hours in the civil service does not seem to be going very smoothly. Apparently at the immigration department, employees have reacted dynamically to the new hours with seven of them on sick leave a week ago.
At the Nicosia District Office, the hours of serving the public remain the same as they were before the new working hours were introduced – 8.30am to 2.30pm. An employee at the office informed me that staff now stayed at work until 3.30 but did not see the public after 2.30.
But the main objective of the new working hours, according to the government, was to offer a better service to the citizens by keeping government offices open for longer. This has not happened. Public parasites are revolting in more than one way.
