By Hermes Solomon
Minister of Finance Harris Georgiades wants no part of Grexit for Cyprus.
Admonished by the president and opposition political parties for speaking his mind, Cyexit is not for us if we meet MoU conditions he insists.
All the gimmicks lenders press on borrowers to maintain the artifice that the loan is being serviced are financial frauds. They are simply new frauds piled on the initial fraud of issuing a visibly imprudent loan.
The borrower (Greece) was never creditworthy and the lender should never have offered her loans of that magnitude and at that low interest rate. The losses belong to the lenders, but the troika would have us believe otherwise.
EU sorely needs to reform its institutions and financial policies.
Most of us know that the IRS/VAT, banks, etc. are preferential creditors during any bankruptcy/receivership – employees come last.
When the foreclosure/insolvency laws are finally passed many employees in both the private, and to a lesser degree, public sector will be faced with personal bankruptcy – repayment of mortgage, school fees, car and other debts becoming unsustainable, just like Greece, where the unemployed refuse to pay bills because they simply can’t.
First electricity supply is cut, then water, main line telephone, etc. and the unemployed sit ‘chewing the cud’ in unheated gas lit homes that are about to be repossessed – a return to the Dark Ages like Eastern EU member and Baltic states, which claim they live on less than the average Greek with the same cost of living.
Are we being fed contradictory facts and figures about the state of our economy in today’s newspaper – tourism income up, unemployment stable, bank interest rates down, cost of shopping basket less, heat, light and fuel cheaper, etc – then followed by fall in GDP, incomes and growth, increase in number of unsustainable NPLs and bankruptcies in tomorrow’s newspaper?
London’s Irish demonstrated outside their Embassy as An Garda Síochána (Irish national police) at home arrested promoters of a pro-Tsipras demo planned for Dublin!
Media hardly focused on pro-Greek demos after Jean Claude Juncker embraced Tsipras (il Padrino kiss of death?) and took him by the hand, fingers entwined, along Brussels’ corridors of power.
Dark Star is what I call today’s EU HQ – a crew of bumbling astronauts on a mission to destroy rogue planets, SYRIZA, Spain’s Podemos, etc. leading Club Med back to the Dark Ages. The twenty eight ‘equally treated’ member states are rather like Orwell’s Animal Farm, wherein the Pigs believe, “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
Ordinary Greeks simply want food on tables, heat and light in their homes and work for the unemployed. Is that really asking too much of the ‘more equal than others’ as MEPs salivate foie gras aux truffes accompanied by fine Sauternes?
Unfortunately for the Greeks, former thieving governments have already wasted away 240 billion euros of loans. The Greeks are now destitute, and frankly, according to the majority of other ‘animals’ on this EU farm, deserve to be.
Earlier imprudent loans were ‘snatched-up’ by a corrupt, inefficient and grossly overstaffed civil service, which has since been halved in size along with salaries. But loan debt increases daily rather than the reverse.
Greece is insolvent, and has already defaulted in all but words. The ‘bravado’ of Greece’s minister of finance and prime minister are Greece’s only bargaining tools. And Dark Star knows it!
Cyprus claims it’s on target, meeting MoU obligations so far – apart that is from failing to enact foreclosures/insolvency law, introduction of a national health scheme, privatisation of SGOs and ‘meaningful’ reduction in civil service numbers, pay and pensions.
Exactly! What is the House of Reps messing about at? Restarting the Cyprob talks has become secondary to sorting out the economy.
Perhaps Cyprus has seen what happened after the previous Greek government applied crippling austerity measures in 2012 and wants no part of it. But at the end of the day, Cyprus has no choice and even fewer bargaining tools – Harris is no Yanis and Nicos is no Alexis!
Drawing out negotiations for as long as possible in the hope Dark Star would explode or become a bottomless black hole dishing out endless dosh has not worked for Greece, which has been put firmly in her place by iron fisted German finance minister, Wolfgang Schauble.
Is SYRIZA about to implode? Unlikely, given the untold damage a Grexit would cause the euro, and subsequently world stock markets. An ‘arrangement’ will be found.
But Dark Star is already knocking at our door: Hello! Is there anyone there?
Of course not; we are waiting to return ‘those troublemakers’, AKEL/DIKO to power and inflict the same suffering on Cypriots that is now endured, and will be for decades to come by PIIGS, Baltic and East European states.
The wheels of bankruptcy and receivership move excruciatingly slowly, but they move, and for us, in a hopeless direction.
Extreme poverty is the outcome of extreme lending; both lenders and borrowers are equally guilty of extreme greed. But it’s those left holding ‘the baby’ that pay the bill, rich rats having jumped ship and bought up areas of Knightsbridge and Kensington, where fixed assets grow daily in value – unlike here in Cyprus and Greece, where the reverse is true.
When big money sleeps in vacant and unsaleable real estate there are no ‘real’ jobs.
Opposition parties should stop making promises that cannot be kept and pass MoU bills through the House fast lest we end up in the same boat as Greece.
As for the rest, ‘Tell it to the marines!’
