Presidential candidate Nikos Christodoulides said he has been victim of an organised attempt to slander and derail him, according to reports appeared on Thursday.

Speaking at a campaign gathering on Wednesday night in the presence of the leaders of Diko and Edek, Nikolas Papadopoulos and Marinos Sizopoulos, who are backing his candidacy, Christodoulides said that the ‘war’ against him will continue to escalate.

Christodoulides was recently accused of asking a former campaign aide, Manolis Kyriacou, to make fake social media accounts to promote his candidacy and hurl abuse at rival candidates.

On Monday, Kyriacou told Politis in an interview that Christodoulides was actively campaigning on the sly while still serving as foreign minister. He would meet privately with cadres from Diko and Edek to discuss his presidential prospects, while all the time publicly professing that he was a dedicated Disy man and had not decided whether he would stand.

Speaking at his event on Wednesday, Christodoulides said that his goal is clear.

“We will create a Cyprus that is better for our children and offer every citizen of this country a better quality of life,” he said.

Christodoulides also added how he knew that the road to the elections would not be any easy one, but that the slander he receives daily is ‘without limits’ and ‘out of bounds.’

However, his campaign team has kept quiet over the fake accounts he asked Kyriacou to create.

In August, Christodoulides was also the subject of controversy, as the foreign ministry confirmed that during the financial crisis in 2013, he continued to receive a foreign posting allowance for months after the former diplomat was relocated to the island from Brussels.

During his last year at the foreign ministry, Christodoulides served as a spokesperson of the Cyprus presidency of the council of the European Union in Brussels.

However, in March that year, he was sent back to Cyprus but continued to receive a monthly €4,860 salary as a general non-taxable cost of living allowance for being posted abroad for another four months.