THE ESTABLISHMENT of a legal aid fund to help investors who had lost money in the Cyprus Stock Exchange bubble take public companies to court is the latest idea the government has been toying with. Finance minister Marcos Kyprianou informed the Attorney-general about this idea and how it would work in a letter that was also sent to the House of Representatives.
According to the Cyprus News Agency, the chairman of the House finance committee said he supported such a move, in principle, but the committee would take a stand only after its members had fully studied the minister’s suggestions. The government would put between £300,000 and £500,000 in the fund, which would be administered by the Attorney-general’s office. Investors would apply for aid through their lawyer, and the AG’s office would decide whether cash would be given.
This is the latest gimmick thought up by the authorities to appease investors who had lost huge amounts of money playing the stock exchange between 1999 and 2001. Last year, Kyprianou came up with another scheme, whereby investors would only pay a small percentage of the investment loans they had taken out from banks; the government would pay off a part of the loan and the rest would be written off by the banks. Nothing came of this absurdly unfair and costly plan, which the banks, quite understandably, opposed. The idea that banks and the taxpayer would foot the bill for investors’ gullibility while the cheats enjoyed their ill-gotten gains was, to put it mildly, preposterous.
Before this ingenious scheme, the legislature had undertaken to investigate the CSE scam, with the deputy leading the probe promising to resign if none of the crooks were put behind bars. After two years of investigations the specially-hired experts made an astounding discovery – the investment loans that were given at the time were in violation of the Central Bank’s directives and were therefore null and void. Investors were not obliged to repay the loans, was the experts’ learned advice! The legal aid idea is just the latest instalment of this ongoing mockery.
Instead of pressing for the prosecution of the crooks who defrauded the public, the legislature and the executive are coming up with ludicrous schemes that will never be implemented. They are as guilty of deceiving the investors as the companies who took their money with cooked accounts, false data and unrealistic forecasts. The government should have devoted its resources to bringing the cheats before justice on charges of fraud and deception rather than coming up with absurd schemes that will lead nowhere.
It is as if the authorities would be happy for the people who took the investors’ money to be let off. Surely the objective must not be the compensation of the victims but the exemplary punishment of the cheats.
