WE WOULD like to apologise to our readers for adopting the practice of chemists and petrol garages and closing down for two weeks in August. This does not normally happen in the cut-throat coffeeshop business, which is way too competitive and back-stabbing to be organised into a pancyprian association like the other professions, but this year we had no choice.
Our kafedjis was given the opportunity to go to Beijing free of charge as a member of the Cyprus Olympic team and took it without a second thought, ignoring the consequences his absence would have on our establishment. This was the holiday of a life-time, paid for by the Cyprus Olympic Committee.
Now you may ask what an overweight, 55-year-old smoker who is clueless about sport had to offer our athletes, apart from the occasional metrios and mahallepi with triantafyllo, neither of which is known to enhance sporting performance? Would it not have been useful for the athletes if the team included a doctor or chiropractor instead of a kafedjis?
Apparently not, because as the chairman of Cyprus Olympic Committee, Kikis Lazarides, informed us, there was a polyclinic full of respected doctors just 50 metres from where our team was staying and he had arranged for our athletes to use the Greek team’s physios and chiropractors.
But to get a Greek coffee in China, on the other hand, you had to go to Shanghai, where there is a small Greek tavern. And the officials (paragontes as they are known in Greek) on our Olympic team who, I suspect, outnumbered the athletes, could not have been expected to survive for two weeks without their Greek coffee.
The Olympics, after all, is not just about the athletes – the paragontes have needs as well. Just because they are on all-expenses paid holidays does not mean that their basic human need for a properly-made metrios in the morning should be ignored so that our high-jumper could be accompanied by his personal chiropractor who could not make a decent coffee if his life depended on it.
PUTTING aside the controversy caused by our champion high jumper Kyriacos Ioannou’s moaning about the Olympic team’s decision not take a chiropractor, Beijing 2008 was a resounding success for Kyproulla, according to some.
The chairman of our Olympic Committee, Kikis, lamented the fact that Ioannou’s moaning had taken attention away from our success. “It is shameful for such words to be spoken at a time when this mission wrote history.”
And this was the problem for Team Kyproulla. Its members were so busy writing history they had no time to win any medals, not even a single bronze.
COMRADE presidente agreed with Kikis and praised the mega-success of our mission, even before we had failed to win any medals. While in Beijing, the comrade visited the Olympic village where he told our athletes the following:
“We may be small but we have a big heart. We have won the respect of the powerful from all over the world and particularly of the host country China and we should be proud of this.” What a pity there was no Olympic 100 metres respect race, as it would have enabled our team to come back with medal.
The comrade did not explain, in his pep-talk to the athletes, how we had won all this “respect of the powerful from all over the world and particularly of the host nation China,” but we have learned it was because they had all read the history our mission wrote in Beijing.
NO RESPECT was shown to comrade presidente at the Overseas Cypriot Conference last Tuesday by the representative of the Church, Bishop Georgios of Paphos, who slammed the comrade’s handling of the Cyprob in front of all the guests.
Christofias saw red after hearing Georgios – speaking on behalf of the Archbishop, who was away at the Olympics as the guest of a bank – accuse him of messing up the talks procedure and giving in to Turkish demands. You could see the steam coming out of his ears as he arrived at the podium, unable to hide his rage.
He savaged the Archbishop’s cheap patriotic rhetoric, informing him that Kyproulla was not a theocracy but a (people’s) Republic. When he finished his secular sermon, he turned to the hapless diplomat, who had organised the conference, Ambassador Stavros Epaminondas, and publicly told him off.
“This has happened at previous conferences as well. I will no longer tolerate it.” Proving his diplomatic qualities, Epaminondas kept his cool, even though he knew his career prospects had just hit zero.
JUST A few weeks after it had been bought by Phil, the Cyprus Weekly shrunk in size, prompting its readers to ask whether it had been put in a tumble dryer. The answer was that the paper moved to the Phil printing press, which uses a smaller newsprint roll.
Initially its old printer had been told that he would carry on printing the Weekly until the end of October, when its production would move to the Phil printing plant. The printer agreed, but set one condition – that the Weekly paid off its debt arrears of four months, which amounted to quite respectable amount of money.
When the paper refused to pay any part of the debt, the old printer informed its management that he would not print it. It therefore had to use the Phil printing press at short notice, which was why some of us older folk needed a magnifying glass to read its August 8 edition.
Instead of designing the paper on the smaller grid, they simply shrunk every page, designed on the old, bigger grid in order to fit into the new page dimensions. The problem was sorted out in the latest issue, which featured an editorial novelty – an opinion column by former owner Andreas Hadjipapas that did not call for respect of human rights in Cyprus. Instead, it called for national unity, which was very original.
IN THE END, Phil’s proprietor Nikos Pattichis ended up paying an extra €210,000 for the Weekly, over and above the agreed price of €3.59 million. The reason was the deal done by his representative, big-shot financier Christodoulos Ellinas.
In the purchase deal Ellinas brokered Patt would have paid €3.59 for the whole business and also collect the €855,000 the paper had in bank deposits. Regular readers will remember how one of the partners, Mrs Hadjipapas had made a big fuss when she went to sign the purchase agreement and found out that she was not entitled to take a share of the paper’s bank deposits.
Mrs Hadjipapas found another way to squeeze a little more dosh out of Patt. She embarked on a frenzied debt collection drive, before the actual hand-over to Patt and once she was done the paper’s bank deposits had reached €1.065m. Anything more than the €855,000 in the bank, she informed Ellinas, belonged to the shareholders. Patt had no choice but to pay up another €210,000 to the shareholders.
This, presumably, was the reason the old boys running the Weekly had refused to settle the paper’s debts to its printer. If they had, there would have been less moollah in the bank for them to demand from Patt.
AUGUST was not a good month for executive chairman of Sharelink Financial Services, Christodoulos Ellinas, in more ways than one. Ellinas was forced to resign from the board of directors of Universal Bank after a letter questioning his suitability to sit on a bank board was published by Politis.
The letter was sent to Ellinas by the Governor of the Central Bank, who wrote that information “at first sight, raises doubts about your ability to fulfil the obligations of a director of a bank.” More damningly, the letter said, the information “indicates, at first sight, that you do not have the required honesty to be a director of a bank”.
After resigning, Ellinas accused the Governor of lacking professionalism, discriminating against him and that making the letter public was unacceptable.
Ellinas did not stop there. A few days after he resigned he issued an announcement attacking Politis for publishing the Governor’s letter attributing ulterior motives to the paper – it was getting its own back on Ellinas because he had brokered Patt’s purchase of the Weekly. Politis had also put in a bid for the paper but lost out.
In other words, brokering the deal was a heroic act by the courageous white knight Ellinas for which he was being punished by the paper that lost out. And the fact that the Governor of the Central Bank had written that “he did not have the required honesty” to be a bank director should not have been reported.
THE GOVERNOR did not write the letter because he did not like Ellinas’ looks. The guy was sentenced to six years in prison by a Greek court in July 2007 after it found him guilty of being an accessory to forgery and fraud. He has appealed but a decision is pending. Nicosia District Court, in another case, had ruled that testimony he had given under oath was “misleading”. A company of which he was a director was fined €80,000 for violating regulations by the Capital Markets Commission.
The Central Bank chief may have had a point, legally speaking, in questioning Ellinas’ suitability for a seat on a bank board, but for Politis to make this public and tarnish the poor fellow’s good name, was despicable.
As Ellinas replied, in writing, to the Governor, he could have listed “an abundance of positive praise and kudos for my personality and referred you to trustworthy sources which would attest to my honest character and to my contribution both to the economy of the country and society.”
Just give the guy back his seat on the Universal board on condition that he stops advertising his honesty and his contribution to our society.
DURING our kafedjis’ trip to Beijing, Phil’s irrepressible bribery correspondent Michalis Ignatiou struck again with some more mega revelations. A couple of weeks ago he reported that a “ruthless gentleman had put his small finger in the USAID-UNOPS honey-pot.”
“This gentleman, it appears, took his gift from USAID through UNOPS. Not only this. An additional amount arrived from Washington. When the dollars ran out, more money arrived from Germany.” He did not of course reveal the identity of the “ruthless gentleman” starring in his latest fairytale.
This is the kind of inventive journalism that the weekly rag-like Periodiko used to resort to some 20 years ago when it would advertise stories about lesbian housewives, wife-swapping in Limassol and drug-fuelled student orgies. Like Ignatiou, the rag never once revealed the identity of the subjects of its titillating stories.
Our friend Ignatiou should start introducing the odd bit of evidence to his bribery tales if he wants anyone to buy his eagerly-awaited science fiction book.
WHOEVER said Akelites have no sense of humour? I did and I stand by my assertion, even though there are exceptions that prove the rule. The party’s parliamentary spokesman Nikos Katsourides was recently at the B of C headquarters, at the time when the board of directors was meeting. He popped into the boardroom to say hello to the directors. Asked why he went into the boardroom by a bank employee, a smirking Katsourides said: “I told them (the directors) that I had come to inform them that we will nationalise the Bank of Cyprus.”
