IN THE PAST, when there was nothing happening in Kyproulla worthy of low-brow comment, we would write about the Cyprob. It was the piss-artist’s security when there was nothing happening or he was too hung over to remember where he had left his notes about what had gone on in the previous few days.
There was always the Cyprob, which for decades produced loony material on an industrial scale for the non-serious weekly scribblers. It no longer provides this professional comfort zone, because it has grown stale and boring, unable to produce any fresh lunacy.
Hearing the Archbishop and the bash-patriots still calling for the need to re-position the Cyprob, 40 years on, cannot be improved on, by our establishment. The asphyxiation-phobic comrade, unholy Chrys and the Annan plan-hating freedom fighters are getting all the laughs, as soon as they open their mouth, leaving nothing for us to add.
Cyprob rhetoric is now parody, leaving nothing for us to write, even when there is no other material. Thank God, we no longer need the Cyprob, because we now have comrade Tof, whose reliability in providing us with a very high standard of material, week in, week out is phenomenal and deserving of our eternal gratitude.
Not since the days of the late, great Spy Kyp (it is the 10th anniversary of his death), has our establishment been so indebted for its inspiration to a single man. And as a show of our sincere and deep gratitude we are seriously considering campaigning for his re-election.
SELF-PITY was his main theme in the past week, as he used International Women’s Day to get in touch with his feminine side. He opened his heart to the largely female audience at a Thursday gathering organized by the AKEL women’s wing POGO.
He was the main speaker of the POGO event to mark International Women’s Day and most of the front seats of the auditorium were occupied by men, illustrating the big strides feminism has made in AKEL. As for the female participants, I have never seen so many badly-proportioned and undesirable women under one roof.
As I cannot believe there are no desirable members of POGO I can only assume the sexy ones were barred from entering so as not to make their unattractive comrades feel bad about their selves, on a day when all women are meant to feel special. The other explanation is that POGO membership cards are only issued to women with short, thick legs and ample back-sides, as a tribute to the party leader.
APOLOGIES for the digression, but I had to get that off my chest. In plea for sympathy, the self-pitying comrade told the ladies that one needed a ‘strong stomach’ to be able to listen to Dervis Eroglu making “threatening statements which constitute a big provocation.”
But this was not the worst of it. “You need a doubly strong stomach to listen to the accusations made in the home front and be able to put up with them,” the comrade told the ladies with the ample back-sides, before revealing that he tried to make sense of this by looking at himself in the mirror.
“Sometimes I look at myself in the mirror and wonder if I am the same man, Demetris Christofias. I wonder if in this country the sense of responsibility has been lost completely and everything is being destroyed.” He did not reveal what the mirror said to him or if he dealt with his identity crisis.
ON WEDNESDAY, the comrade and the first lady held a reception at the Palazzo de la Popolo to honour Women’s Day. It was a multi-cultural affair as a woman in head-scarf was pictured being greeted by the first couple but the majority of the guests were, according to our palazzo moles, had the figures and the looks of POGO members.
Now that the comrade has marked an international day with a reception at the palazzo will other such days be observed? On June 20, World Refugee Day would he throw a bash for all the refugees and on December 18, International Migrants Day, will he have a cocktail party for the asylum seekers, political refugees and illegal immigrants?
On May 14, World Migratory Bird Day, he could invite some ambelopoulia.
IN THE PAST, members of the National Council, after meetings, restricted themselves to leaking Cyprob documents and reporting colleagues for taking to unpatriotic positions. But there was a change of policy after Wednesday’s meeting with some participants revealing exactly what was said. The revelations confirmed what everyone had suspected – more maturity is shown at a drunken teenagers’ beach party than at a National Council meeting.
The comrade was again in self-pitying mood, especially after being accused of not briefing party leaders – not even the House president about what was happening in the talks. House president Omirou and his predecessor Garoyian both complained that the comrade never briefed them.
In response, Tof censured Omirou and Garoyian for never going to the airport to greet him when he returned from trips abroad, as he used to do when he was House president. Of course he never said that he engaged in this pathetically provincial practice, because he liked being on telly, standing behind Clerides and subsequently the Ethnarch, because it played up his sense of self-importance and massaged his big ego.
AFTER giving a lesson on economics and how to beat the recession, to the EU’s College of Commissioners, the comrade decided to give a lesson on international relations to the European Summit.
He told his fellow EU leaders that they should be very careful when interfering in matters related to the countries of the ‘Arab spring’ and especially Syria, so as not to create the impression that the EU was policing the region. He was merely repeating the naïvely superficial rubbish uttered by leftists, who hate the West
Would the comrade have preferred no EU policing of Syria so that the Assad regime could carry on massacring people undisturbed? His problem is that he genuinely believes he should share his wisdom with others.
He would do well to follow Mark Twain’s advice. “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.”
THERE was good news for the B of C’s new share issue on Thursday after the House of Representatives approved the trusts bill which had been parked at the House Finance Committee for months.
Regular readers will recall last month’s item, about how a Russian oligarch’s divorce case was threatening the Bank’s share issue, aimed at increasing its capital base. Oligarch Dmitriy Rybolovlev is currently involved in an acrimonious divorce, with his wife demanding a settlement of close to $3 billion. He wanted to put his fortune in a trust so it would be safe from his wife’s lawyers, but the Cyprus’ trust law was pretty basic, needing drastic modernising.
A bill was prepared by the government, but deputies at the House Finance Committee would not send it to the plenum for approval. Rybolovlev’s people had told the B of C that if the trust bill was not approved he would not exercise his right to buy the new shares. The issue would have flopped as the oligarch’s company is the biggest shareholder in the B of C – it holds 10 per cent.
The bank’s head honchos, terrified of the prospect of an unsuccessful share issue, have been begging deputies for weeks to approve the bill. Their pleas finally paid off, the trusts bill approved just a week before the deadline for shareholders exercising their rights. Mrs Rybolovlev might not be too happy with this development, but we hope she understands that our deputies had a patriotic duty to protect our biggest bank.
ARCHBISHOP Chrys announced that the Church would help out our banks, because they could not be left to be taken over by foreigners. Asked how much the Church would invest in the banks to keep them out of foreign hands he did not say.
He avoided mentioning a f
igure for the obvious reason that the investment he has in mind is way too small to make an iota of difference to the banks. But he still felt it was his patriotic duty to express Church confidence in our banks, even though his patriotism did not involve putting his money where his mouth is.
MONEYBAGS Bishop of Kykkos and Tylliria, Nikiforos does not go for such cheap publicity stunts. He is more businessman than politician looking after the Church’s business interests. On Wednesday, there will be a news conference to present the new bottle of Kykkos water and it will be attended by Bishop Nikiforos. The organizers did not give a reason for his presence, but hopefully he will stick to blessing the new bottle than tell us that Kykkos monastery would be bailing out our banks so they don’t fall into the hands of the Archbishop.
YIORKOS Lillikas went to Washington in a bid to build his profile as a credible presidential candidate. In Washington he arranged a photo op with Senator Robert Menendez, the senator all Cypriot politicians meet when they visit the US. These meetings are arranged by the head of Cyprus Federation of America, Panicos Papanicolaou. But now that Yiorkos has met Menendez his bid to be a presidential candidate has been given a big boost.
EVERYONE tried to cash in on APOEL’S amazing victory over Lyon in the knock out stages of the Champions League, including the dyed in the wool Omonia-supporting Akelites. The comrade and Stef Stef both said they felt proud for APOEL’s achievement but only a fool would believe them.
To be fair however all the excesses that followed Anorthosis’ much smaller success in the Champions League a few years ago, were avoided. We did not hear any crap linking APOEL’s win to a new era of achievement in the political field, even though I did hear one bash patriot boasting that this was a “triumph for Hellenism”. He was pushing it considering there were only three Greeks playing for APOEL and the coach is a Serb.
Not that this should diminish the success of our champions. It was still a victory for Cyprus. And perhaps if we want to be as successful in politics as we are in football we should hire some foreign politicians to run our Cyprob policy.
We might even be able to re-position the Cyprob if we get some foreigners in.
