Tales from the Coffeeshop: Keep your eyes on the forest and bail out the football clubs

WHEN it comes to rewarding law breakers nobody does it as generously as our politicians, perhaps because they identify with them. They certainly have no time for the honest folk who obey the laws, pay their state dues and repay their bank loans in full, considering them simpletons.

So, during the banking crisis, the parties blocked the foreclosures law to protect people not repaying their bank loans. Caring deputies then decreed that a primary residence cannot be foreclosed thereby helping people to stay in properties they had only paid a fraction of their true value for and never really owned.

These people were subsequently rewarded by government schemes, by which the state undertook to cover a part of their housing loan (as long as the property was not worth more than €350,000) while the bank also took a small hit, so long as the defaulter made regular repayments.

In short, by not repaying his housing loan, a man was rewarded by the state with a loan discount of about 30 per cent, because in Kyproulla the state performs a Robin Hood style charity – it takes the money from law-abiding citizens and gives it to lawbreakers.

NOTHING illustrates this insane policy better than the way the state has been rewarding people who have been recklessly mismanaging Kyproulla’s football clubs by refusing to pay debts to the state and totally disregarding the repayment agreements they had signed. These debts now stand at €37 million.

If any of these guys was running a business, he (I use the male pronoun because football clubs are exclusively male preserves) would have been dragged through the courts, issued big fines, had their assets seized and some would have ended up behind bars as well.

As directors of football clubs, they have immunity from prosecution for such criminal offences because they enjoy protection from the entire political system. The Christodoulides government has taken this protection racket to another level. The finance ministry is preparing a bill that would raise the tax on betting so the increase in revenue could go towards paying off the football club debts to inland revenue, the VAT service and social insurance fund.

A law-abiding citizen will pay higher tax on a bet, and the money will go towards paying the debts of law breakers to the state. No compromises on rule of law in Kyproulla.

THE RULE of law did not end there. The finance ministry also issued certificates to the clubs that they had no outstanding tax debts, so they would not be in breach of Uefa rules and can compete in European competitions and in the domestic league.

These certificates are based on a law that has still not been approved. If it is approved, the repayment of the clubs’ debts by the state will be completed in 15 years, but technically speaking, at the time of issuing the certificates to fool Uefa, the debts were outstanding.

There have been countless schemes for the clubs over the years – one dates back to Ethnarch Tassos’ presidency – but the clubs never honoured the repayment agreements they made with the state, knowing that the worse that would happen to them would be for the government to come up with a new repayment scheme they could again disregard.

Previous schemes involved long repayment periods, on condition that new tax dues were paid promptly, but this never happened. After last year’s scheme, which started in May, 14 of the 19 clubs incurred new debts amounting to €4.8m, said an audit office report, while five of the clubs did not make a single repayment.

THIS was why finance minister Makis Keravnos decided to reward the clubs with the law that forces the taxpayer to pay off their debts. He avoided saying what would happen to the tax dues clubs will not pay from now on.

Will he increase the betting tax again to cover the new debts to the state of the bankrupt clubs? And will the state be giving any money to the tiny number of clubs that are operating within their means and have been paying their taxes promptly?

Of course not, because the directors of these clubs are fools who deserve to be punished for not adopting the state-sponsored business model of insolvency.

Keravnos, appearing on Antenna TV, used some brilliant economic arguments to eloquently defend his scheme. “We must see the issue in its entirety, we must not just look at the tree, but the forest, and the forest is the existence of a number of football teams that take part in leagues, European leagues etc. If in this country, we want this forest to exist we must see the matter from the total approach.”

THE GOVERNMENT has not been setting a glowing example of compliance with the law for the football clubs. It has been ignoring the law it prepared and which has been in force since February regarding the government advisors, hired on contracts.

Although the law stipulated that the names of these advisors should be made public, the government avoided doing so for six months until last Tuesday. It had initially issued the list with just the initials of the advisors, ludicrously claiming that giving their names would be in breach of personal data protection.

When the list with full names was finally released, Phil informed us that this happened at the behest of Prezniktwo. Who had been preventing the publication of the full list of names for six months without him knowing about it? At least our upstanding Prez’s delayed intervention ensured his government stopped violating its law for longer than six months.

MOST of these so-called advisors have been given jobs as payback for campaigning for the prez or because they are family friends or relatives of family friends and their numbers keep rising. There were originally 19 but the list has 31 advisors.

Apart from the name and gross monthly salary, the university qualifications of each advisor are listed. It was Odysseas who insisted that all advisors should have university degrees, as if a degree was proof of intelligence and ability.

One of the prez’s five advisors, named Spyros Stylianou has a PhD in biomedical science, an MSc in Recombinant DNA Technology, a BSc in Molecular Biology and a Diploma in Deep-Sea Saturated Oil Operation Diving. Is he advising the Prez on molecular biology or recombinant DNA technology?

The highest-paid advisor works for the deputy minister of migration. Lambros Kaoullas, who is on €5,166 a month – more than double the average pay for these political hangers-on – is a Doctor in Philosophy in the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, has an MSc in Criminology and Criminal Justice and BA in Sociology and Criminology. Do these qualifications justify him earning €2,458 more a month than Spyros Stylianou who also has a diploma in deep-sea saturated oil operation diving?

DEPUTY minister of tourism, Costas Koumis made a big cock-up of the Tui excursions to the north in his effort to promote his Diko-lite patriotism and to prove that tourism could also be put to the service of the unyielding struggle for liberation.

It turned out that Koumis, who tried to cash in on the controversy surrounding Tui’s day-trips to the north, did not know what he was talking about. These trips were part of the Green Line regulation, something Koumis was unaware of when he told a local Tui employee that they would be stopped.

He had not even informed the Prez, according to media reports, presumably because he wanted to take personal credit for stopping the day trips and for sparking mass hysteria among the Turkish Cypriot politicians with his fantasy politics.

What was his advisor, who has a ‘Master(sic) of Business Administration in Human Resources’, doing when Koumis was making a total fool of himself. 

“THE PRESIDENTIAL residence on Troodos opens its gardens for the first time to the public and waits for you” said a tweet by the deputy ministry of tourism posted on ‘X’. The deputy ministry was referring to “festival of traditional tastes and handicrafts” on that was the “initiative of the first lady within the framework of her charity activities”.

We love to show off our lack of perspective. It is just the gardens of the Troodos residence that is being opened for the first time, not the Palace of Versailles.

Hopefully the finance minister will be up there with critics of his football scheme to show them how to see the forest rather than the trees. There are a lot of trees up there.