DISY’S deputy leader Averof Neophytou may have been half-joking yesterday, when he accused the left-wing government of siding with the banks against the Eurocypria workers, but he was making a perfectly legitimate point. He was referring to the way the government had misled the legislature in order to secure its approval for a €35 million bail-out for the charter airline.
In February the government secured legislature approval, by telling deputies that the amount would make all 320 jobs at Eurocypria safe and allow the company to become viable again; it had also claimed that it would make a profit this year, which was one of the biggest jokes of the year. A few months after deputies were told the airline would make a profit, the finance minister started arguing that a merger with Cyprus Airways was the only way for both companies to survive.
A merger is now in the offing but so are job losses. This prompted Neophytou to claim that the left-wing government had put the interests of the banks above those of the workers. Some €25 million of the amount approved went towards paying off debts to the banks while Eurocypria was also facing losses in the region of €14 million for this year. Neophytou, quite rightly, asked why, was the taxpayer’s money used to settle the company’s bank debts. The airline should have gone into administration and the banks should have been left with the bad debts – penalised for their bad decision to lend so much money – Neophytou argued.
This was very much a case, as he said, of the government taking money from the taxpayer under false pretences. In fact the government’s entire policy on the airlines has been marked by misinformation and lies. When it wanted the legislature to approve the €35 million it claimed both airlines could survive. Once the money was in the bad, it decided that a merger was the only possibility. The promise that all jobs would be safe was also a lie.
How could the merger have been successful if the labour costs were not reduced? A voluntary retirement scheme has been put in place, but how many employees will take it up? Will redundancies follow? And how would the merger take place, considering that Eurocypria pilots are paid lower salaries than their counterparts at Cyprus Airways? Would Eurocypria pilots be given a pay rise or CY pilots a pay cut? And what chance of survival would the merged company have when it start off with accumulated losses, for 2010, in the region of €40 million? Perhaps the taxpayer will have to pick up the tab.
The government may have protected the banks, as Neophytou said, but when it comes to mismanagement and squandering the taxpayer’s money it has stayed true to its left-wing ideology.
