THE ANGER and frustration of our deputies about the host of ridiculous allowances and benefits being paid by the state to public employees did not last very long.
After the obligatory couple of days of theatrical ranting and raving against the irrational squandering of the taxpayer’s money, they had performed their duty, calmed down and moved on to the more important issue of the municipal elections.
In fact the deputies would have said nothing about the matter of perks had Politis not published a report about the absurdity of these costly and unjustified allowances last Sunday. They had been in possession of a brief, prepared by the finance ministry, which listed the 40 allowances and cost of each one for a week without publicly expressing their outrage.
Once it became public knowledge they could not longer keep quiet, they had to take a stand. And they did, even if their criticism of the allowances, delivered with mock-anger, could have been dismissed as hypocrisy of colossal proportions, which it was.
The allowances being paid to the public parasites are peanuts compared to what is paid to our self-serving deputies. The allowances a deputy receives every year add up to €38,272, including some €12,000 for office expenses. None of this is taxable, but it goes towards calculating their pension, which for 10 years of service is a staggering €62,000 per annum.
This amount is three times what is paid as a pension to a British MP for 10 years’ service. Brits, for whom being an MP is a full-time job, also contribute about 12 per cent of their salary towards their pension, in stark contrast to our guys, who until a few months ago contributed zero.
Sixty-two grand a year for 10 years of part-time work and zero contributions is not a pension in the conventional sense. It is legalised theft from the state, which may explain why the members of our kleptocracy were not too keen to talk about the allowances.
MOST of the allowances being paid out to the public parasites are pretty ridiculous. There are allowances for people doing a job they are hired to do – frogmen are paid extra when they dive and helicopter operators when they are in the sky.
Cops enjoy a host of allowances that boost their income, including the legendary, ‘good conduct allowance’. There is also an allowance for clothes if they have to work as a plainclothes officer but it cannot be very much, given how badly-dressed cops are.
They are paid extra if they are in charge of something like a station or if they have extra job responsibilities. The list is too long for this space, but it should be noted these benefits were given before the cops were allowed to be unionised, so now they belong to a union they could get a moustache allowance as well.
HIGH-RANKING public officials even get an allowance for drinks they offer their guests. The highest allowance for this purpose is €6,000 per annum. If we subtract weekends, public holidays and annual leave, these people are at the office for 200 days a year which means they have €30 per day for offering drinks to their guests.
At €1.50 per drink (ministry coffeeshops do not charge Starbucks prices nor do they sell vintage wines), they would need to have 20 guests a day (4,000 per year) to get through their allowance. If they had 20 guests every working day they would have no time left to do their job. The reality is that they have closer to 200 guests a year, which gives them a handsome, annual tax-free profit of €5,700.
THIS is small change compared to the amounts leading members of the kleptocracy take from the state. Our comrade president is on a representation allowance of €35,857 which is pensionable and he also collects the per diem pay of €200, whenever he is abroad, in contrast to his predecessors, even though all his expenses are paid for. I will not mention the cost of the penis-extending guard of 100 cops.
When he was House president he also increased the representation allowance of the position taking it to 29 grand. As president he boosted the allowances of top state officials, tripling the tax-free earnings of ministry perm secs, commissioners and supreme court judges.
The representation allowance is now €18,000 per year and is pensionable.
EUROKO carried out a study and found that this increase added €750 to the monthly pension and €42,000 to the retirement bonus of a state official, who had been in the service for 33 years.
The comrade may have behaved like a true capitalist in using his position to lawfully squeeze as much cash out of the state for himself, but he did not completely forget his socialist ideals. He also generously distributed some of the spoils to other members of our kleptocratic establishment so they would turn a blind eye to his own greed.
THE RECESSION however has exposed the greed of our ruling kleptocracy with its members publicly squabbling over the fast dwindling state dosh. The union kleptocrats cannot tolerate that their blood-sucking members will now have to accept a smaller cut of the loot, while deputies, perm secs and ministers give up nothing
This is why five miserable, greedy old men from the PASYDY secretariat have filed an appeal to the Supreme Court against the government decision to cut their wages by a small amount. Their claim is that it was unconstitutional reduce the parasites’ thieving from the state. Their miserable leader Hadjimourmouris is certain they will win because blood-sucking is constitutionally protected.
IF THEY DO not win, the public parasites could always call a strike. Not that it would make much difference to the public, as they would only be doing marginally less work than normal.
Strikes have become a real possibility after finance minister Kikis Kazamias announced his latest package of measures – a wage freeze in the broader public sector. Apart from PASYDY the teaching unions had also warned they would go on strike if their members were forced to make more ‘sacrifices’.
Every couple of weeks Kikis announces a new batch of measures telling us that these would finally sort out public finances, but he seems to get it wrong every time. I bet, in the unlikely event he gets the wage freeze approved by the Council of Ministers, he will return with more proposals before December 15 – the deadline set by the EU for the budget measures.
We should not be too hard on Kikis because apart from the unions he also has to deal with the comrade president’s and AKEL’S opposition to his measures. AKEL has already pooh-poohed the proposed wage freeze while the comrade has promised no measures will be taken without the approval of union bosses.
The proposal for stealing 0.5 per cent of a company’s annual revenue, irrespective of whether it is making a profit or not, was included not so much to appease the unions but to persuade the comrade defender of the klepocrats to accept the freeze.
A NEW star emerged this week – Rikkos Mappourides a counsel at the AG’s office who sued the government over the decision to cut the wages of public parasites. The penny-pinching Mappourides, a failed parliamentary candidate, appeared on a radio show crying because his salary had been reduced by €150 a month. This meant he was taking home about 4 grand a month. The ingratitude of these cheap parasites, to a state that has been overpaying them for decades, never ceases to amaze.
WHAT a pity that the sanctimonious tree-hugger Giorgos Perdikis fell off his high moral perch this week after it was revealed that he is as committed a member of our kleptocracy as all his other public-spirited colleagues. When he was leader of the Greens, Perdikis, who likes to play the Virgin Mary of Cyprus politics, had turned down the offer of police bodyguards, something he has always made a big song and dance about. What he never said was that for five
years he was taking a monthly allowance of €1200 in lieu of a security detail so he could hire a chauffeur, which he never did.
DR FAUSTUS’ behaviour was even cheaper than Perdikis’. When a cop from his 12-man security detail reached retirement age and his guard was reduced to 11, he was given a €1200 allowance by the state so he could hire the retired cop. So even though the state provides him with 11 cops it was also paying so he could have a 12th of his choosing.
This bodyguard allowance could spare the good doctor the humiliation of having his security detail reduced to a paltry four men; this was what the government decided. He could receive an allowance of €9,600 to hire another eight bodyguards. If the government does not agree, he should not be down-hearted because the appeal for volunteer bodyguards we made last week had a huge response.
MULTIPLE-pension collector and former Central Bank Governor, Ttooulis Ttoouli is not really qualified to give radio show lectures about the need of the government to cut costs. The guy was collecting some 10 grand in monthly state pensions for the different state posts he served. And as finance minister in the Clerides government, he would boast in the ’98 election campaign that the government had spent much more than its predecessor. On Monday, Ttooulis was on the Lazarus show on which he appears regularly as an authority on economic issues, because the presenter approves of his hard-line position on the Cyprob and uttered the following pearl of wisdom. “As you know,” he told Lazarus, “I am never absolute.”
IN THE end, former finance minister Michalis Sarris followed the advice of our establishment and did not show up in the Turkish Cypriot court. In a brief statement, he said he did not believe he would be given a fair trial. Recently, the low-profile Sarris has been taking an active part in public debate about the economy on TV and radio. Does he see an opportunity for a top political position arising now that Italy and Greece have both appointed technocrats at the head of their governments, in the hope of rescuing their economies? The only problem is that we have a presidential system and even after our economy goes bust we would still not be able to replace the village idiot.
NOBLE Energy downplayed expectations of big gas deposits in our Aphrodite plot at a presentation its head honchos gave in Texas last Tuesday. They claimed that the gas deposits would be between 3 and 9 trillion cubic feet, which would be significantly lower than the forecasts made by our expert Solon Kassinis, who based his estimates on his gut instinct.
We expected him to be on the radio shows the following day informing the public that Noble had got everything wrong but he was nowhere. His only reaction was a diplomatic view given anonymously to Reuters which quoted a ‘Cypriot energy official’ as saying, “I am sure that the findings will be satisfactory to all.” It was obvious it was him as there is only one ‘Cypriot energy official’.
WHEN Andreas Moleskis was still head of the secretariat the EU presidency, he took the Council of Ministers an expenditure request for €5 million. He proposed to use this money to buy pens to give to all the presidency’s guests who visited Kyproulla. His brilliantly original idea was blocked by the then finance minister who felt that 5 million for pens was a lunatic idea. This was the type of expertise we lost when Moleskis was forced to resign.
