By Hermes Solomon
TEN thousand homes are under threat of repossession, affecting between fifty and eighty thousand citizens – a loose government estimate of affected citizens with its leeway of thirty thousand.
Is bankrupt developer stock included in those ten thousand homes? And if it is, why haven’t we been told so? You get the impression that only first residence non-performing loans (NPLs) are numbered – not vacant and up for sale property, nor that of ‘the island’s crooks’.
If provisos introduced by opposition parties into the troika foreclosures bill are refuted, AKEL and DIKO will take the fight to the country – what an apathetic lot they are – and lose.
We already know the outcome of further negotiations; non, non et non, fourteen times from the troika. Homes will fall under the hammer – one by one – surreptitiously.
And when they do, the economy will momentarily skim upon the water like a flat stone thrown then sink to the bottom, where it will remain until ‘better times’. And ‘better times’ are many years off.
You bargain hunters will have to wait. There will be no bonanza. Repossessed properties will go en bloc to unnamed purchasers. You will not even be invited to auctions, which will be held à huis clos (behind closed doors).
Consider the chart and compare it to when annual property overseas sales stood in their thousands not hundreds. And let’s be honest, sales in 2013/14 were conducted at prices well below pre-crash values – apart, that is, for several Chinese purchasers, who were conned pricewise for the sake of ‘worthless’ long term residents’ permits.
If you’re really looking for a bargain, go inspect For Sale properties and make stupid offers to vendors before the banks step in. Those steeped in debt will probably bite your hand off.
Bombast, pompous blathering, ranting and pretentious noises emanating from union leaders and political parties objecting to the troika foreclosures bill on the grounds that it will be disastrous for the economy, serve no purpose other than to confirm that objectors, and their families, have themselves taken out loans well beyond their means.
Objections at this far gone stage in the game are worth trois fois rien (nothing). The dire NPL issue, known to us as far back as 2008, should have been tackled then, not now. Today the outcome is de facto – rather like the partition of the island; leaving NPLs and the Cyprob unresolved in the hope that they would self-resolve was naïve to the extreme.
But it wasn’t our fault I hear you say. It was the fault of German and French banks, which suddenly and unexpectedly withdrew 50 of their 60 billion euro term deposits held at our banks.
Then what about those hundreds of uncollateralised property developer loans issued by complicit bankers, and banks outside the Eurozone exploiting our high rates of interest, and Russian ‘mobster’ and Brit depositors?
But, in the main, only German and French banks avoided the hair cut. The rest, including ordinary Cypriot savers and SMEs, all got whacked big time, or if you prefer, robbed.
Eurozone banks were geniuses. They were the only participants to seriously reduce their holdings prior to the default. It makes you wonder if they weren’t in cahoots with the European Central Bank (ECB), which loaned Laiki billions in Emergency Liquidity Assistance (ELA) to keep Cyprus banking afloat until those geniuses had got their billions out.
And to top that, the troika (an ECB body-check) have the cheek to return to Cyprus, destroy the economy and insist on repossessions across the board.
Who set up ‘the sting’ in the first place if it wasn’t German and French banks ‘unsupervised’ by the ECB? Premeditated first degree deception if you ask me. Had ELA not supported an already bankrupt Laiki, matters would have come to a head much sooner with far less collateral damage…
Like aggrieved bondholders, the Central Bank of Cyprus should be suing the ECB for foul play by Eurozone banks in cahoots with the ECB.
Of course, our banks were greedy – thinking they could lend any amount at high interest to pay off depositor interest. And that error of judgement, when Libor rates were on the floor with the recession biting holes into our economy, helped cause the country’s downfall. But that error wasn’t the main cause of the downfall.
Perhaps AKEL and DIKO should instead be baying for ECB, and not DISY, blood!
Hilary Mantel wrote in her 2012 Man Booker Prize winning novel, Bring up the Bodies based on Henry VIII courtly intrigue, “They tell us that the rules of power and the rules of war are the same, the art is to deceive; and you will deceive and be deceived in your turn, whether you are an ambassador or a suitor. Now, if a man’s subject is deception, you are deceived if you think you grasp his meaning. You close your hand as it flies away. A statute is written to entrap meaning, a poem to escape it.”
Ironic that the attorney general should only now be accusing opposition parties of unconstitutionality, when our lawyer politicians have the reputation of being the world’s worst deceivers, only to be out-deceived by the ECB.
The troika now writes the statutes, not the attorney-general, AKEL, DIKO or even DISY, which is something opposition parties and the unions have yet to grasp.
No amount of purple prose by politicians will escape the meaning now clearly defined in troika statutes. But only you and I know that!
