AKEL paints dismal economic picture

By Andria Kades

THE government is trying to sway the public with misinformation, telling people things are getting better when in fact the rich get richer and the poor poorer, AKEL’s general secretary Andros Kyprianou has said.

In a damning speech, he said 70,000 people in Cyprus were without a job and a whopping 240,000 live below the poverty line.

According to Kyprianou, the top 10 per cent of Cypriots have seen their income rise by 3.4 per cent during the course of the past two and a half years, while 90 per cent of society has seen its income drop an average of 8 per cent.

Kyprianou’s speech outlined “the measures promoted and pushed for by Anastasiades’ government… say a lot about the wealth distribution over the past two and a half years,” where the poor get poorer and the rich get richer. Asked where these figures were obtained from, an AKEL chart was emailed to the Cyprus Mail.

Meanwhile, 30,000 young people left the country, Kyprianou said, 60,000 people rely on food banks, while labour relations were falling apart and public wealth was being sold off for pittance.

Advertised on a daily basis as a “success story” by the state, Kyprianou said the word ‘story’ was the only point they were right about.

“It is a story and the government as well as DISY should remember this when they finish celebrating us leaving the memorandum because life will go on after March when the memorandum will end,  but the austerity measures will still be imposed on the people when we are free from the memorandum but not the loan agreement.”

Some of AKEL’s figures differed somewhat from official sources. For instance, the latest Eurostat figures put the numbers of unemployed at 64,000 with 234,000 people at risk of poverty in 2014.

Also using the party’s own charts reveals that 25,300, and not quite 30,000 people emigrated from the country since 2013.