THE PLENUM has blocked CyTA’s bid to invest in Greek telecoms company Q- Telecom, which has acquired a service provider licence for mobile telephony in Greece.
Communist party AKEL raised the issue during discussion of CyTA’s 2003 budget at the plenum on Thursday.
Deputies Nicos Katsourides and Stavros Evagorou made it clear that the majority of the House (AKEL, DIKO, KISOS and the Green Party) believed investing in Greece has been and is a “thing of the past.”
Speaking to the Cyprus Mail yesterday AKEL deputy Evagorou said CyTA investment in Greece was a bad idea.
“AKEL has studied all the relevant data submitted by CyTA,” he said.
“But at the same time we have carried out an in-depth investigation into the economic parameters of Q-Telecom and Infoquest which is the mother company. Our opinion is that this in not an investment that should be given the go-ahead; it is a high-risk investment in what we believe is a saturated market.”
CyTA spokesman Paris Menelaou refused to comment on the plenum decision, saying the authority did not have an official decision from parliament.
“We don’t have a formal CyTA notification at the moment,” he said.
“As far as we are concerned nothing has changed. But if the
Communications Minister says ‘knock that one on the head’, then fine.”
In January, the House majority blocked CyTA’s expansion plans for investment in Q-Telecom, despite previously approving £30 million for the project last April.
CyTA chairman Efstathios Papadakis reportedly blamed election motives for the decision, saying the board should seek privatisation of the semi- governmental organisation after the elections, or suffer inevitable decline.
Papadakis maintained that all the studies proved that the investment was a good one and expressed his deep regret at the collapse of the project.
On the issue of CyTA’s institutional framework, DISY deputies Rikkos Erotocritou and Prodromos Prodromou warned the plenum that the government had delayed upgrading the authority leaving it vulnerable to competition.
Prodromou accused AKEL of being inflexible and trying to prove that if CyTA was made public the government would lose control.
