UNLESS we start praying for rain from now and the Archbishop organises some special church services for rain, I suspect we will be in for a very difficult summer next year, as regards the water supply – probably worse than 2008.
There are two compelling arguments supporting these fears. First, we have had our year of heavy rainfall and we are due another one after about four years. I agree this is not the most scientific argument, but I cannot remember two successive years of heavy rainfall.
Second, work on the Episkopi desalination plant which would have been ready by mid-2010, according to the government’s initial predictions, and would have covered all our water needs, has not even begun yet.
The earliest the Limassol desalination plant would be ready, we are now told, is mid-2011, assuming that works begin tomorrow (two years are needed for the plant to be set up) The reason for the delay has been the obligatory appeals against the decision of the Water Development Department by the consortia which submitted offers for the contract.
The contract was originally awarded to the Zemco Construction consortium in June 2008 because the offer submitted by the German WTE consortium, although cheaper was deemed not to satisfy the requirements set out by the Water Department.
To cut a long story short, WTE submitted supplementary documentation and with the help of an ad hoc Technical Committee, the Tenders Review Authority (TRA) decided to give the German consortium the contract on 29 December 2008. Within two weeks Zemco and the third cheapest consortium MN Limassol Water Co appealed against the decision.
On June 5 this year, Zemco’s appeal was rejected, but MN Limassol’s was successful which meant it would be given the project. After the decision WTE lodged an unsuccessful appeal at the Supreme Court, while now other bidders are said to be considering appeals against the decision.
In the end, the only people who benefit from these appeals trivialities and insanity, which delay every government project by a couple of years, are the lawyers. Next summer if you have no water to flush your toilet I suggest you go to the courts in any town and beat up a lawyer – he is to blame.
THE GOVERNMENT, although obliged to accept the MN Limassol bid, is not very pleased with the TRA’s decision as MN’s tender was €27 million more expensive than WTE’s.
The Water Development Department has avoided signing the contract with MN, which means that we would be lucky if the Episkopi desalination plant is ready at the start of 2012 at the soonest. The decision to delay the signing of the contract by a few months was taken at a meeting at the Agriculture ministry attended by the Attorney-General and Auditor-General last month.
At Wednesday’s Council of Ministers’ meeting at the comrade’s dacha in the hideously unfashionable Kellaki, the agriculture minister Michalis Polynikis submitted a proposal for the creation of a second mobile desalination plant, at a cost of €60 million which was rejected by his colleagues. It was obvious that the Water Department did not want to sign a contract with MN Limassol and was looking for alternative solutions.
And you can’t really blame the Department or the Ministry for resenting paying a much higher price (€27m more is a lot of dosh for our struggling state) to a consortium that was responsible for delaying the procedure and landed the contract thanks to its lawyers’ abilities to pick holes in the tenders submitted by its competitors.
We may have no water next summer, but the taxpayer will reward the consortium responsible for his hardship by paying it a premium price for its desalinated water when it finally produces it. The government has our establishment’s full support on this one. We would rather die of thirst than see a consortium landing a contract to overcharge the taxpayer, thanks to its smart lawyers.
ONE OF THE members of the MN Limassol Water Co consortium has played the system of appeals with consummate skill over the years. I refer to Varnavas Irinarchos, the Logicom Public Company managing director who makes a habit of appealing to the TRA whenever his company loses out on a public contract.
Even if Logicom loses out the competition for a project because it quoted a higher price, it appeals to the TRA, finding technical omissions in the competitor’s bid, and wins the contract, usually at a higher cost to the taxpayer. The higher cost covers Logicom’s substantial legal expenses.
Logicom also has a big share of the responsibility for the delays in the setting up of the National Health Scheme, as it has been using its lawyers to stall the efforts of the Health Insurance Organisation to develop information systems for the scheme.
It appealed against the terms for a competitive dialogue the Organisation would have had with three selected companies – IBM, NCR and Logicom – in May 2008 and won. The Organisation modified its terms, in accordance with the TRA decision in January 2009 and asked for proposals from the three by March 26. Two days before the deadline Logicom appealed against the new conditions because it was unwilling to satisfy them and blocked the process until July 28, when the TRA finally decided to reject the appeal.
Having lost its appeal at the TRA, Logicom applied for an interim order to stop the procedure at the Supreme Court, which decided that it would hear both sides in the dispute tomorrow. If it rejects the appeal Logicom will be excluded from tendering for the National Health Scheme information systems, to which we would say Hallelujah and praise the Lord. It would be nothing more than the company deserves.
ONLY IN a lunatic asylum run lawyers, like Kyproulla could these things happen. The buyer of services (Health Insurance Organisation) invites companies to make proposals for a huge and highly complex information system, on which the success or failure of the National Health Scheme would depend, and is being told what terms and conditions, it should set by one of the prospective suppliers (Logicom).
It is a bit like building a house and you ask for tenders from three architects, but one of them takes you to court because you want to build a wooden house but he wants you to use cement because this is what suits him. It is insane – the supplier is entitled to stall the process and imposing its terms on the buyer, which Logicom did. In a normal country, the buyer would have told the supplier who was causing trouble, “Go to hell, because we do not want to do any business with your company.”
In Kyproulla you cannot even do that, because we have laws, rights and procedures but the used of reason or common sense are outlawed.
LAST WEEK we praised DIKO’s principled stand over the semi-governmental organisations. Our praise may have inspired the statement issued last Sunday by party chief Marios Garoyian, congratulating himself and his party for its idealistic stand in refusing to take a share of the spoils.
If this was the case we apologise, as it was not our intention to put Garoyian on a moral pedestal and to encourage a boring, self-righteous rant about his party’s dignity. He said: “We proved that we are not interested in anything from the past, we carried out our self-criticism; we are interested in other things, as we can live without spoils and without powers, putting an end (sic) to those who thought they could buy our support with some appointments.”
By Wednesday, Marios was attacking the government’s handling of the Cyprob, the economy and cronyism, proving that a lot more than just ‘some’ appointments were needed to buy DIKO’s support. We do not doubt DIKO’s principles but its methods are as subtle as a protection racketeer’s.
MANY WILL have noticed the dramatic improvement i
n the appearance of our first lady comrade Elsi Christofia. Gone are the ill-fitting, out-of-shape, cheap-looking outfits that gave her the frumpy housewife look. All of a sudden she is looking almost smart. The skirts nicely-cut and match her blouses, the shoes are obviously more expensive and colour combinations are pretty harmonious. No prizes for guessing that she has employed the services of a personal stylist to improve her appearance. The woman who undertook the task of transforming comrade Elsi from modest, suburban Akelite housewife to an elegant first lady was Niki Lazaridou, the style consultant whose biggest coup was to hire a well-known, foreign-based, Cypriot dressmaker to design and cut the first lady’s outfits. Apart from telling her charges what to wear Ms Lazaridou also instructs them on what make-up to wear and how to have their hair styled as well as teaching them how to walk, talk and behave in polite society. We do not know how successful
the elocution lessons have been but on the appearance front, Ms Lazaridou has worked wonders disproving the proverb that you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.
SO IMPRESSED has the comrade presidente been with Ms Lazaridou’s work that he decided to reward her by appointing her to the board of the Cyprus State Fairs Authority.
As we have no honours list, individuals who make a positive contribution to our society, are rewarded by the state with seats on the boards of semi-governmental organisations, thus reducing Diko’s shares of the spoils and forcing Garoyian to take principled stands.
In the official list about the SGO appointments the occupation given for Ms Lazaridou is ‘Producer of radio shows’, which is also correct as she presents a show on Astra radio. If her occupation as First Lady’s style advisor was listed then the presidente may have been accused of rusfeti.
We are seeing the development of the Court of the Communist King and before long Ms Lazaridou will be teaching our presidential couple how to behave like royalty.
THE FIRST lady was in her element, entertaining the wives of the ministers at the family’s dacha in Kellaki (not the most stylish place to have a holiday home and I’m sure Ms Lazaridou does not approve) last Wednesday. While all the ministers had a Council of Ministers’ meeting, their wives all sat around in the garden chatting. However, there should have been a man with them – the husband of Labour Minister Sotiroulla Charalambous – but we did not see him on any of the TV footage and assumed he chose not to attend. It must be a bit awkward, for him to sit with all the women, while his wife discussing important affairs of state with the blokes.
THE PRODUCER of the Erini Charalambidou’s radio show, To Syzitame, is vying for the post of head of television at the CyBC. She is currently deputy-head, but is hoping to land the vacant post with the help of AKEL’s favourite TV presenter. Erini had used the close ties with our ruling communist party to reach a deal with her producer, who had been under pressure from the bash-patriotic DIKO board running the corporation to block some of the presenter’s choices of subjects for discussion. The political chat-show diva told her producer to back her controversial choices, which angered the board, and in exchange she would use her contacts in AKEL, (comrade Andros and the presidente) to get the producer appointed head of television. With an Akelite now appointed chairman of the board and rusfeti no longer practised, Erini’s producer could very well become the head of television.
ONE OF THE Ethnarch’s disciples is planning a comeback. Yiorkos Lillikas, former government myth-maker, ex-foreign minister, Francophile, dove-turned-hawk and protégé of the late Ethnarch will return to public life as a newspaper publisher and, it goes without saying, national saviour.
Lillikas will take over the unfunny, weekly satirical rag Pontiki and turn it into a daily that will fight against the comrade’s efforts to solve the Cyprob unfairly and unjustly. The funding apparently will come from Archbishop Chrys, who was recently quoted as saying that the only acceptable solution was the construction of a Chinese wall along the dividing line. Some hacks have already been approached and offered jobs on Pontiki which is supposed to start publishing daily in September. We wish Yiorkos every success in his bid to save Kyproulla from the disaster of a solution. Starting a daily newspaper in these economic conditions is not the smartest business decision he could have taken, but Lillikas has never been interested in the money. Saving Kyproulla is the national priority now for all Paphite mega-patriots; and it’s the Church’s money that will go into the new rag, not Yiorkos’.
