Banks come under fire for role in stock market crisis

By Melina Demetriou

NEARLY 1,200 people were found guilty and jailed for the 1929 Wall Street crash and some others committed suicide, deputy Christos Pourgourides stated yesterday during the course of a House meeting examining the Bank of Cyprus’ responsibility for the stock market crisis.

Chairman of the Watchdog Committee and DISY member made this observation about events of 1929 when discussing the stock market crisis. He said: “Nearly 1,200 people were imprisoned because they were found responsible for the Wall Street, among them 70 bank officials. Some even committed suicide.

“Who is going to pay for what happened in Cyprus?” he asked.

Earlier, during a joint session of the Parliamentary Watchdog and Finance Committees deputies said the Bank of Cyprus (BoC) chairman Solon Triandafyllides had made investors believe that the Bank’s share value was going up while it was in fact declining.

Deputies accused Triandafyllides of urging investors not to sell their BoC shares when the Bank started trading in the Athens Stock Exchange (ASE) last year.The BoC started trading in ASE with a £5.32 worth share while the Bank’s share price in the Cyprus Stock Exchange (CSE) was then £6.32.

“I know that I am not allowed to make comments about share prices but I am very impulsive and very honest so I can’t help saying things like that,” Triandafyllides responded.

“Why let investors sell their shares? At the time we expected the share price to increase because the Bank had just started trading in the ASE,” he added.

The BoC share price was £11 in 1999 and is now £2.

Triandafyllides boasted that the Bank share’s mid-price yesterday stood at£1.99, 7 cents up on the day before.

“Oh, that means I only lost £9 because when I invested in BoC its share value was £11,” DISY’s George Georgiou responded.

Pourgourides then gave an example of a rather naive man who invested £10, 000 in BoC shares and lost the money. “This old man told me that he had £10, 000 which he was saving for his daughter. He kept it in his closet because he did not trust banks. One dayhe saw a sweet man (Triandafyllides) on television saying that his bank’s share was doing very well and he decided to invest his money in BoC,” Pourgourides said. The results were there for everyone to see, he added.

Popular Bank chairman Kikis Lazarides also came under attack from deputies in an earlier meeting of the Finance Committee.

The two House committees are working on an investigation to uncover who were responsible for the CSE crisis.

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.