The four people who served as transport minister between 2013 and 2023 “bear heavy responsibility” for the issue of faulty airbags and their permeation into the Cypriot market, the report submitted by the committee formed to investigate the history of faulty airbags in Cyprus stated.

The report, which was seen by the Cyprus Mail on Tuesday, highlighted the decade between 2013 and 2023, when Efthymios Flourentzou, Marios Demetriades, Vasiliki Anastasiadou, and incumbent Famagusta district governor Yiannis Karousos were in post.

It wrote that none of the four “acknowledged or took responsibility”, which the committee would have expected of them given their roles and that this absolution of responsibility had been done “under the pretext that no one informed them about the problem with the Takata airbags and the way in which the road transport department dealt with the problem”.

“If they knew about it, they would have brought it up, and they would have certainly dealt with it, as has been proven by the fact that they also faced other issues during their terms in office as ministers,” the report stated, though it expressed its disagreement with this position.

Instead, it said, “a minister does not need to have direct and personal involvement in an issue for it to be attributed to them”, adding that “if the people at the top of the political and social pyramid do not take responsibility for their actions, they are encouraging the consolidation of general and political impunity”.

It said the former ministers bear responsibility for “the inaction, negligence, and indifference shown by the road transport department” over the matter, and that the former ministers’ “position that they do not bear any responsibility due to not being informed cannot be accepted”.

“Any act carried out by employees of their ministry or of the services under their ministry ultimately reflects on themselves. In any case, the responsibility for not being formed lies with themselves for another reason, as well,” the report stated.

“They should have implemented an appropriate information mechanism so that they were presented with any problems handled or faced by the departments and services under the responsibility of their ministry.”

This, it added, is something they “did not implement”.

As such, it said that incumbent Transport Minister Alexis Vafeades had “become involved in solving the problem” in 2023 “due to information he had been given” by the father of Kyriakos Oxinos, who had been killed in an incident involving a faulty airbag that year.

Vafeades, the report said, had not been informed “by the competent authorities or by the ministry’s permanent secretary, who should have duly informed him”.

The report had been submitted by committee chairman and former Supreme Court judge Michalakis Christodoulou to Attorney-General George Savvides on Friday.

“We have presented the findings of our investigation. The attorney-general is responsible for whether to adopt the recommendations, and the courts are the final judge,” Christodoulou said, adding that the committee had found “a possibility of there having been an abuse of power, a homicide, causing death due to a reckless act, and serious injury”.

Faulty airbags are known to have caused the deaths of two people in Cyprus, Styliani Giorgalli and Kyriakos Oxinos.

Christodoulou said that in light of those three incidents, “we base our assessment on the actual context of whether it is established that there were criminal offences committed”, and that “the committee’s response is positive”.

Christodoulou had been joined on the committee by Bar Association chairman Michael Vorkas and audit office member Theodosios Hadjimichail.

For a little over two months, it conducted public hearings into the matter, interviewing numerous civil servants and ministers past and present.

The issue of airbags stems from the production of faulty airbags by Japanese company Takata. The company’s airbags suffer a fault related to exposure to high levels of heat or humidity, which means they have a tendency to explode when released under such circumstances.

This explosion shoots the airbag’s metal inflator outwards and in the direction of the person it was designed to protect, potentially causing further injuries or, in some cases, death.

With the report now in Savvides’ hands, he will study its findings and decide whether or not any criminal or disciplinary offences were committed, and whether the committee’s recommendations for future safeguarding and oversight should be implemented.