Knives out with spate of rumours in the diplomatic corps

CAREER prospects and the perks of the job are the stakes in the mudslinging debacle in the diplomatic corps, replete with allegations of sexual misconduct, embezzlement, abuse of power and extravagant lifestyles at the taxpayers’ expense.
Foreign Minister George Iacovou is said to be furious with the rumours, as the vast majority of cases that have seen the light have turned out to be little more than idle gossip.
The Foreign Ministry is currently accepting applications from ambassadors for transfers, while at the same time considering promotions in the corps. But it seems the time-honoured competition for “popular” destinations has taken a nasty twist. Increasingly, the feeling is that the candidates are trying to get an edge by discrediting their rivals.
The latest case involved a complaint by a male employee at a Cypriot embassy in a Middle Eastern country. The man, a Lebanese national, said he was sexually harassed by the ambassador, and reportedly personally lodged his complaint with the Foreign Ministry.
The ministry’s permanent secretary Sotos Zakheos was dispatched to the country in question. After investigating, Zakheos reached the conclusion that malicious slander was behind the whole affair.
“This is all nonsense, most of the time nothing is going on,” Zakheos told the Mail yesterday, but did not wish to elaborate.
He also declined to comment on whether the embassy’s Lebanese employee might have been coached to make the complaint.
Apparently, investigating officials have been able to track down the people who started the rumours in the corridors of the Foreign Ministry.
Another, more devastating meansof smearing someone in the corps is leaking information to the media. Even if the story turns out to be false, the ambassador facing the allegations needs to be suspended pending the outcome of the probe. Moreover, where sexual themes are involved, the smear-peddlers can cause domestic troubles for the accused ambassadors.
Both Zakheos and Tasos Tzionis, head of the President’s diplomatic office, had their hands full in one such recent case.
In February, Politis broke a story about a scandal involving photographs of a Cypriot ambassador that appeared on a gay website.
The article spoke of an ambassador working in a Central European country, whose half-naked photo appeared on the website with what appeared to be a request for a sexual partner.
The photos were believed to have been uploaded by a third party, with the aim of ‘outing’ the ambassador.
The sources tipping off the newspaper claimed to be “concerned Christians” lamenting the lack of morals at the embassy and describing events there as “Sodom and Gomorrah”.
The paper received its information from an anonymous email with a link to the contentious website, and it emerged that the hapless ambassador’s photo had been posted there for several months. It has since been taken down.
For the Foreign Ministry, this state of affairs has been embarrassing to say the least; but more broadly, the constant flow of claims has made it harder to separate fact from fiction.
Costas Papadimas, Cyprus’ former ambassador to Sweden, is currently facing 26 charges, most of them related to sexual harassment claims made by two female employees and a diplomat at the embassy in Stockholm.
In 2002, the Cyprus ambassador in Moscow was recalled pending an investigation into alleged irregular expense claims made at the embassy. He had allegedly made payments of $900 to a fictitious housemaid to mask false claims for expenses. Expense receipts were allegedly submitted claiming salary payments for a second housemaid.
And in 1999, Cyprus’ ambassador to Egypt was investigated by the Foreign Ministry after it was alleged he had hosted a bouzouki night at his residence in Cairo to promote the island’s political cause, complete with Romanian dancing girls and smuggled wine.
The senior diplomat allegedly charged Cairo’s high society $60-a-head for the so-called ‘Cyprus experience’, reportedly using his diplomatic status to smuggle 372 cases of KEO wine into Egypt, by-passing the 300 per cent import duty levied by Egyptian customs. The court declared there was insufficient evidence to charge him.

The Cyprus Mail is the only English-language daily newspaper published in Cyprus. It was established in 1945 and today, with its popular and widely-read website, the Cyprus Mail is among the most trusted news sites in Cyprus. The newspaper is not affiliated with any political parties and has always striven to maintain its independence. Over the past 70-plus years, the Cyprus Mail, with a small dedicated team, has covered momentous events in Cyprus’ modern history, chronicling the last gasps of British colonial rule, Cyprus’ truncated independence, the coup and Turkish invasion, and the decades of negotiations to stitch the divided island back together, plus a myriad of scandals, murders, and human interests stories that capture the island and its -people. Observers describe it as politically conservative.