Petros Nacouzi was on Sunday elected as the Maronite Cypriot non-voting representative in parliament, winning 51 per cent of the vote to take the seat.

He won 1,606 of the votes cast, with his only opponent Marios Mavrides, who had been a voting MP for Disy since 2011, winning 1,519 votes.

Nacouzi, 56, is an accountant, and co-founded accountancy firm Forvis Mazars in 2007, where he remains a managing partner.

He replaces Yiannakis Moussas, who had served in the role between 2016 and last month, and who had earlier this month during a meeting with President Nikos Christodoulides said that in recent years, “a lot of things happened, and a lot of things happened in a short period of time” to improve conditions for the Maronite Cypriot community.

Those achievements, he added, included that “the infrastructure in our villages … has improved”, as well as a “drastic increase” in the number of Maronite Cypriots moving to traditionally Maronite villages in the north thanks to increased subsidies and incentives offered to them by the government.

“You know very well that without our villages, we have no hope of surviving,” he said.

He will sit alongside the non-voting representatives of the Armenian Cypriot and Latin Cypriot communities, Vartkes Mahdessian and Antonella Mantovani, who were both elected unopposed earlier this month.