THE EUROASIA Interconnector that will link our electricity grid with that of Israel and Greece has run out of funds and the project promoter is seeking assistance from the state to complete the project, which is estimated to cost close to €2 billion.
The responsibility of preparing public opinion for this possibility has fallen on the hapless energy minister George Papanastasiou, who, I am informed, had privately questioned the viability of the project, but is now exploring ways of offering state assistance. It is in this context he described it as “very important and strategic for Cyprus”.
The state, he said was considering either providing loan guarantees – reportedly in the region of €600 million – or putting money directly in the project and becoming a shareholder, as if state participation could be a guarantee of success. Remember the co-op bank?
Common sense would suggest the project promoter did not find the funds because investors were not sure of the viability of the project. The promoter applied to the European Investment Bank for funding but received no response, which could be regarded as a polite rejection.
So now the Cypriot taxpayer is being asked to step in and salvage it.
COULD the sudden government interest in helping this very important and strategic for Cyprus project have anything to do with the fact that the project promoter, Nasos Ktorides, made a sizeable financial contribution to the prez’s election campaign?
Not necessarily. It could be that Nik II is being pressured by Nik I to help out, for reasons that are unknown. What is known is that Nik I went out of his way to help the EuroAsia Interconnector secure funding from the European Commission.
His government lobbied the Commission about the need to connect Kyproulla to the European network and secured €657m in assistance from Brussels. He then gave instructions for a €300m grant to be given to EuroAsia from the Recovery and Resilience Fund but encountered strong resistance from the finance ministry. In the end, as a compromise, a €100m loan was granted to the project from the Resilience Fund.
The good news is that Papanastasiou said on Friday that no decision would be taken before a viability study was carried out. Hopefully it will not be the same firm that did the viability study for co-op bank, the disastrous bailing out of which cost the taxpayer a few billion euros.
THE EMOTIONAL cliches we have been hearing every July for half a century have fallen like torrential rain on us in the last 10 days as the great and the good performed their patriotic duty of marking the black anniversaries and condemning the twin crimes of coup and invasion.
I do not want to sound insensitive to suffering inflicted by the Turkish invasion on some 200,000 people who lost loved ones, and had their homes and lives stolen from them overnight, but it is not the victims we hear during the black anniversaries.
It is the good-for-nothing politicians who have made lucrative careers out of the Cyprob, posing as uncompromising warriors and selling false hopes to the victims, while plundering the country and fighting off any opportunity of a settlement, backed by landowners and developers who became mega-rich thanks to the occupation of half the country.
How can you hear these mock-melodramatic, patriotic speeches, repeated every year by the beneficiaries of the continuing occupation, as anything other than self-parody? They have been waging their unyielding struggle against the occupation with cliches for 49 years, and I am sure they will be happy to carry on doing so for as long as they breathe.
POLITICAL correctness, in the way it is experienced in places like the US and UK, thankfully, has not arrived in Kyproulla. It only exists in relation to the Cyprob discourse, in which we always have to use the ‘pseudo’ prefix when referring to anything related to the occupied north.
There is the pseudo-state, pseudo-police, pseudo-courts, pseudo-government, pseudo-airport, pseudo-PM and so on. When writing you can avoid the prefix by putting the word in inverted commas, which indicates it is not the real thing and you cannot be accused by the patriotism censors of recognising the pseudo-state.
Nowadays, the vigilance has faded, but according to the bastion of patriotic correctness, Rik, any visit by a Turkish government official to the ‘north’ is ‘illegal’ and the adjective ‘provocative’ must describe any statement made by a Turkish Cypriot or Turkish politician.
We do not show the same sense of political correctness, however, in using ‘black’ to describe the anniversaries. In the US, using black as an adjective with negative connotations is regarded offensively racist. Perhaps when marking the 50th anniversaries we will think of a different colour for them. It can’t be green or blue, but red might be an option.
THIS COULD be the first task for the advisor on multiculturalism that Prez Nik II said he would appoint during a speech he made to the 7th Youth Conference of the European Parliament of Cyprus on Friday.
In his address the Prez said, “as a government we have an obligation to support and strengthen the youth platforms that that promote inter-cultural contacts, pluralism, accessibility, diversity and urban, social and political equality and fight discrimination in all its forms.”
And what better way to do this than create a post for someone, who voted for him, as an advisor on multiculturalism, acceptance and diversity, who will ensure the inclusion and acceptance of African, trans and asylum seekers in our society?
BEFORE the youth conference in Paphos, Friday’s election campaigning took the Prez to the old Larnaca airport, where he was the guest of honour at the unveiling of the two new Airbus A220 by Cyprus Airways.
He was also shown around one of the brand-new planes, as if he had never been inside a plane before. He told a hack, who asked, that ‘of course’ he would fly in the A220. Why only the other week he went to Brussels on a commercial flight and returned on one as well, he said, to underline the sacrifices he makes for the country.
The private jet was at the mechanics for repair work, and he has no Saudi friend like his predecessor to lend him a plane.
Meanwhile, a day before our prez unveiled the A220, Turkey’s prez Erdogan, not only illegally visited the pseudo-state to attend the invasion celebrations, he also avoided arrest when he unveiled the new runway at the pseudo airport.
STUNG by the universal criticism of its sensible decision to end the across the board subsidy of electricity bills, Wednesday’s council of ministers’ meeting decided to offer a new scheme to help people deal with the energy price – loans for the installation of photovoltaics.
The initial impression was that only low-income groups would be eligible but George Papanastasiou later explained that the scheme would be open to everyone. The full cost of the PV system (4, 7 or 10KW) would be covered by a loan offered by the banks and repaid in affordable monthly instalments through the electricity bill. People would also have to invest in batteries for storage of electricity because the grid would not be able to take the load, the minister said.
The scheme will be ready in autumn, said Papanastasiou although that sounds rather optimistic, given that the EAC will be in charge of it, and its unions have a tendency of blocking any initiative that is deemed harmful to their members’ interests.
As for the beneficiaries of the scheme, it will certainly not be the low-income earners in real need of state support, as the overwhelming majority of them live in flats where no PV can be installed.
SHOULD we believe the English or the Greek news in the Philenews website. In the Greek version it reported, under the headline, “New era at Primetel with active support from Signal Capital,” that the London-based, private equity firm, Signal Capital, “significant associate and main funder of Primetel, in the last five years, undertakes to actively support Primetel.”
In the English-language, In-Cyprus, hosted on the same website, under the headline, “Primetel placed under administration after defaulting on loan,” it reported that “Telecommunication company Primetel finds itself in troubled waters as it was placed under administration on Tuesday, July 18, following a failure to fulfil obligations linked to a loan acquired from the British investment fund, Signal Capital Partners.”
There is a big difference between actively supporting a company and securing a winding up order because it is unable to repay its loans.
PREZ NIK II asserted, during his July 20 speech at the presidential palace that “I am not interested in the communications management of the Cyprus problem.” That he has done nothing else since his election is beside the point. He also came up with a new soundbite which we will hear a lot more in the coming months – a settlement is “a dire necessity” – but he did not say if it added value to the communications management of the Cyprob.
