By Anthony O. Miller
ANGRY jet-ski operators from all over Cyprus gathered last night at the main offices of Povek (the Union of Small Businessmen and Retailers) to plan their next moves in opposing new restrictions on their hours and sites of operation.
In the end, the 35 owners opted by unanimous vote not to strike for the time being, and to reopen negotiations with the government over their grievances.
The operators instructed their lawyers to meet Tourism Minister Nicos Rolandis, Communications Minister Leondios Ieordiaconou and House President Spyros Kyprianou, saying there would be no strike unless the government spurned the opportunity they were being given.
The island’s water sports operators are bristling under a new law’s reduced hours of operation — between 10am to 1pm, and 4pm to 7pm — Cyprus Water Sports Association President George Dimitriou told the Cyprus Mailyesterday.
Before the new law’s June 11 passage by the House of Representatives, operators could rent jet-skis and other water-sports craft from dawn to sunset.
Demetriou said the operators also resented Ierodiaconou’s consolidating their rental sites to the margins of sandy swimming beaches, versus their old sites every 500 hundred metres or so along the coast.
The government made the twin changes in reaction to at least three ski-jet accidents last year that killed one British tourist and seriously injured three others.
“Oh, yes, we have had complaints,” from water sports operators, Melios Georgiou, general-secretary of Povek, told the Cyprus Mailyesterday. “They are not too happy about the shorter hours. They are also not happy about the movement of the (sea-access) corridors,” he said.
The jet-ski operators have twice this year massed outside the Presidential Palace to protest against the changes before they became official.
Glafcos Karyiolou, a Cyprus Tourism Organisation (CTO) employee who helped draw up the changes, confirmed that the CTO had received complaints from at least one hotel, the Venus Beach in Paphos.
Memnos Sophocleous, Venus Beach Front Office Manager, said yesterday the corridor restrictions had caused some problems for his hotel, since its contracts with tour operators promised water sports rentals closer to the hotel than the “one place for water sports” in Paphos, now some distance down the beach from the hotel.
“Unfortunately… the guys are very upset and they are out of control,” Cyprus Water Sports Association President George Dimitriou told the Cyprus Mailyesterday. “We cannot hold them any more to legal procedure to gain our demands,” he added.
“If we can find some way to continue negotiating, we can end this,” he said. “(But) most of the people… want to burn the municipality, they want to kill the police. They want to go to extremes,” he added.
Dimitriou, who rents out jet-skis at the Four Seasons Hotel in Amathus, said last night’s Povek meeting sought to give his membership copies of the new rule changes and “cool them down as much as possible, and make them realise the law is the law, and altogether we have to figure out what to do to minimise the problem.”
“Yes, we agree with the government that certain things need to be done. Fair enough. There is some logic to it. But there’s no logic at all to trying to put this law in action within 24 hours,” he said.
“You cannot tell a person (whose business ways) you have accepted for eight years … within 24 hours: ‘Mister, you are out of a job’. His employees, his family, his finances, his bank debts. Who is going to pay all this money? Who is going to look after all these people? This is our major problem,” Dimitriou said.
