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Our View: Foreclosures law has descended into farce

The farce surrounding the foreclosures law just refuses to go away. Our political parties, unable to find any other worthy cause to champion, have made it their mission to create obstacles to its implementation, and have been at it for years. The easiest way of doing this is by suspending the law for a few months at a time, but as this cannot be done forever deputies are also submitting proposals that will make the implementation of the law very difficult.

At the latest House finance committee meeting there were about 19 law proposals in relation to the foreclosures and the representatives of the Central Bank and finance ministry expressed objections to 17 of them. Undeterred, the committee decided that the proposals of similar philosophy should be grouped together so they are replaced by two to three common proposals, which should be ready in a fortnight. It was also suggested that a sub-committee, made up of representatives of all the parties, was set up to find convergences among different proposals.

In the end, four proposals relating to the suspension of the foreclosures law were withdrawn and only the latest one, submitted by Akel, remained. If voted, this would suspend the law until the end of June. Meanwhile some proposals related to the expanding of the authority of the financial ombudsman, but he disagreed because his office was understaffed and could not take on more work. Finance Minister Makis Keravnos said this was not an issue because he would arrange for staff to be immediately moved.

Do the politicians want the financial ombudsman to have more powers because they do not trust the courts, or is this just another delaying tactic, given that the ombudsman’s decisions are not binding? Perhaps this was another way of further complicating the foreclosures law so it would not be implemented and primary residences would be protected forever. Legislators feel duty-bound to protect people that live in houses they cannot afford to pay for, or simply refuse to, because nothing will happen to them when they do not. They are protected by the parties, which, ever since they voted the foreclosures law, have been doing everything possible to render it a dead letter.

The question is why do they not repeal the law and save themselves all the time and effort required to come up with proposals that would prevent its enforcement. This would be the rational thing to do, even though it would undermine the stability of the banking sector and affect the economy’s credit rating. Then again, as parties have shown, time and again, their priority is to protect people who refuse to repay their housing loans.

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