By Patroclos
SOMEONE had some fun at poor old Patroclos’ expense last week, spreading rumours about foreclosure proceedings by the bank because of our establishment’s non-performing loans.
The only reason for last week’s closure of the Coffeeshop was that Patroclos was suffering from a non-performing brain and was advised by his personal banker to take a sanity-restoring break, cutting all links to the nut-house and avoiding any mental activity for at least a week.
It was a very enjoyable experience and gave him an insight into how many of our politicians, who suffer from the incurable version of this disease, make their decisions. It also helped him understand why people vote for AKEL.
As a word of warning, customers should be told that sufferers of a non-performing brain have no way of knowing if they have fully recovered so please show a little understanding if Patroclos displays any Akelite symptoms today.
THE MEDIA seized the chance to report a rare, feel-good, positive story last week, making a big song and dance out of Noble Energy’s plan to start running a natural gas production test at the Aphrodite-2 well.
It would take Noble a few weeks to establish the quantity and quality of the natural gas, but the drill stem test (DST), as it is known, showed that we were moving a step closer to the goal of becoming a regional energy hub.
Given the dearth of good news in the last year, media euphoria over the ‘flaring’ of the well, was inevitable. ‘Flaring’, or lighting up, the well gives clues regarding the content of the natural gas in the sea-bed. Hacks referred to this as the ‘lighting of the flame’ as if this were the Olympic Games.
AT 6.57am on Thursday, the Sigmalive website triumphantly reported that the ‘flame had lit up’. At 11.34am Phil’s web-site, Philenews also informed its visitors that the ‘flame was lit’. Natural gas champions Neoclis Sylikiotis and Yiorkos Lillikas issued joyous statements welcoming the lighting of the flame and the start of the Noble games. EDEK did the same.
By Thursday afternoon it was clear that the ‘lighting of the flame’ had not happened, with Tass News Agency reporting that it could take as long as a week for the flaring to be completed, a point confirmed by the commerce minister.
The start of the Noble games may have been postponed but the fun has already begun. Phil reported yesterday on its front page that the start of the procedure for the lighting of the flame “had whetted the appetite of the Turkish side”, with the hungry pseudo-leader Eroglu proposing joint exploitation of hydrocarbons.
BACK in the nut-house, the government’s submission of 14 bailout-related bills for approval by the legislature whetted the appetite of the political conmen of AKEL for some disgustingly cheap point-scoring.
The party of the non-performing brains decided to vote against the bills that would change the status of the co-ops, so it could pose as the defender of the kindly, but corrupt, credit institutions which helped poor farmers and workers. It even brought its sheep outside the legislature to make noises against the bills.
However its brilliantly cunning scheme, to blame the other parties for the restructuring of the co-ops, which, incidentally, comrade Tof had agreed to in the November memorandum, did not go according to plan, because the armchair warriors of EDEK also wanted a share of the glory in defending the co-ops against the evil troika. EDEK decided to voted against the two relevant bills and with the backing three independent, professional nay-sayers, they were defeated.
This meant the €1.5bn would not be released by the troika for the recapitalisation of Hellenic Bank and the co-ops which would either have to bail in depositors (the poor farmers and workers protected by AKEL) or go bankrupt.
In the end the co-ops were saved from their defenders, by the neo-liberals of DISY who changed half a dozen words in the bills and arranged a second vote, after midnight. All parties backed the two bills, which was shame because we would all have liked to have heard who AKEL would have blamed for the collapse of the co-ops.
IN GREEK, the continuous plundering of an organisation or company is referred to as ‘to megalo fagopoti’ which translates as ‘the big feast’. The megalo fagopoti was brought up on a morning radio show on which the guest was a senior ranking official co-op official. Told that co-op bosses had indulged in a big feast just like the bankers had done, he replied that their fagopoti was much smaller. “Ours was just a kebab, by comparison,” he said, with a note of regret in his voice.
So was the €10 million worth of unsecured loans granted to the family company of the head of the co-ops, Erotokritos Chlorakiotis just a kebab?
THERE will be no more kebab for the co-op bosses once the restructuring is completed. And the smile will be wiped off the human face of the co-ops with its anthropocentric ideology for good when they are brought under the supervision of the Central Bank and no longer be able to help people.
The human face of the co-ops is the reason they have capital needs of €1.5bn. Their kindly, kebab-eating bosses did not mind if customers never repaid their loans, considering it a success if they just collected some of the interest due. There were co-ops with as much as 90 per cent NPLs.
This must have been what inspired the Central Bank Governor, Professor Panicos, to say on June 28, last year: “The supervision exercised over the co-operative credit institutions by the Supervisory and Development Service of Co-operative companies is effective and secures the robustness, correct operation and development of co-ops….”
Will he carry out the same effective supervision now that the co-ops are under his authority, or will he have to follow instructions from AKEL to allow them to have a little kebab occasionally?
OUR BANKS also showed their human face in the last few years, but nobody has given them any credit for it. Laiki gave loans worth tens of millions to Vgen’s friends and associates who never bothered to meet their repayment obligations.
And the much-maligned B of C, according to a report in last Sunday’s Kathimerini, carried on giving loans worth tens of millions to developers (Aristo and Leptos), who had not made repayments on older loans of tens of millions, for years. Were the executives who took these decisions, from which the whole country is now suffering, promoting the human face of the BoC by being so kind to these developers?
THE BoC might show a human face to millionaire developers, but its poorer customers have been seeing a very nasty face. One of our establishment’s customers, struggling to make ends meet every month, went over his €800 overdraft limit by €300 a little while ago, and he has been receiving threatening letters from the bank ever since.
The latest letter was also sent to his friend that guaranteed the measly €800 overdraft, threatening him with legal action if the excess was not covered immediately. Until last year, the BoC was giving away hundreds of millions to insolvent developers, who could not make any loan repayments but it is now turning the screw on the little people that have exceeded their overdraft limit by 300 euro.
I bet it has not sent any letters threatening legal action to Leptos and Aristo.
THREE retired state officials, indulging in a megalo fagopoti at the expense of the taxpayer for years, have decided to appeal to the Supreme Court against the law that deprives them from taking multiple state pensions.
A law passed recently has deprived them of their civil service pensions, which they were receiving in addition to their state pension for holding official posts. They are Afxentis Afxentiou (former perm sec, finance minister and Central Bank Governor), Christodoulos Veniamin (former perm sec, interior minister and AKEL deputy) and Dina Akkelidou (former State Lab director, health minister and AKEL deputy).
Poor old Afxentiou is incensed because his state pension payments were cut by 50 per cent, drastically affecting his standard of living. He will now have to live on four grand a month instead of eight, a great injustice. We were paying Afxentiou a pension of 100 grand a year because as governor he helped put Cyprus on the world map as a money laundering centre.
Even more fascinating is the greed of Veniamin, who is now in his nineties and can have no use for all the money he is taking in state pensions. Why has he gone to court? Has he not taken enough of the taxpayer’s money in double and triple pensions all these years? Perhaps he wants to save some money for when he gets old.
WHOEVER said that DIKO chief Marios Garoyian is only interested in rusfeti, a share of the spoils of power and wind farms did not know what he was talking about. Marios also has a keen interest in international diplomacy.
Only the other day he prepared a proposal for resolving the Syrian crisis in a peaceful way, which he forwarded to our foreign minister, who was to present it at Friday’s informal meeting of EU foreign ministers that would have been attended by US Secretary of State. We do not know whether the meeting adopted the proposal which, according to Marios who has all the qualities needed by a world statesman, would benefit both world peace and the Cyprus republic.
SO FAREWELL Petros Clerides, who decided to resign as Attorney General a month before he was due to retire. Clerides was not the smartest AG we ever had, but he had one endearing quality – genuine modesty, which is not a very common trait among our top state officials. Winston Churchill’s remark about Labour PM Clement Atlee, seems appropriate for Clerides – “a modest man with much to be modest about.”
Staying on the issue of quotes will the old sea-wolf, who was described in yesterday’s Cyprus Weekly as “the late president Glafcos Clerides”, write to the paper to put the record straight? He could perhaps repeat Mark Twain’s response to the newspaper that reported he had passed away. “Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.”
I AM USING quotes of famous people because after my non-performing brain incident, my personal banker told me to take it easy for a while. Here is what the country legend Willie Nelson said in support of disgraced American cyclists Lance Armstrong: “I think it is just terrible and disgusting how everyone has treated Lance Armstrong, especially after what he achieved, winning seven Tour de France races while on drugs. When I was on drugs, I couldn’t even find my bike.”
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