THE ALTRUISM and sense of community of the highest-paid members of our society really warms the heart.
As if it were not bad enough having the judges taking the government to court because it had cut four or five per cent from their fat salaries last year, this week we had the state hospital doctors moaning because their earnings disqualified them for free healthcare, which they enjoyed until recently. The decision was “unacceptable, unethical and immoral”, said the doctors’ representative.
Then we had the Central Bank governor sending a letter to the legislature asking that Central Bank employees be exempted from the public sector pay cuts, because the approval of the European Central Bank was needed. Failure to inform the ECB, could lead to legal action against the cuts on the grounds that the correct procedure had been violated, wrote Professor Panicos.
Was he being serious? Was there half a chance the ECB, which is part of the troika, would create a problem because it had not been informed about the pay cuts? And why had the finance ministry not written to the ECB to inform it about the pay cuts it planned to impose on Central Bank staff? The cuts had been decided more than two weeks ago.
The Central Bank defended itself by claiming it wanted the correct procedure to be followed. But why did it not inform the finance ministry, which has the responsibility to inform the ECB about cuts, about this obligation two weeks ago instead of raising the matter on the day the bill was sent to the legislature for approval?
The governor’s second in command, Spyros Stavrinakis, who had filed an appeal in the Supreme Court against last year’s pay cut which reduced his earnings by a couple of hundred euro, I am informed by Central Bank sources, had nothing to do with this oversight that would have ensured no pay cuts for a few more months.
WE WERE bitterly disappointed with comrade Tof’s address to the Kyproulla nation on Tuesday. It was depressingly predictable, as he told us that the banks and Athanasios Orphanides were to blame for all our woes including the need for a bailout.
He even told a big lie, claiming that Orph’s decision to allow the merger of Egnatia Bank and Popular Bank had added debts of €4.5 billion to the latter’s balance sheet. The debts would have been there even if Egnatia remained a subsidiary of Popular.
Apart from the banks and Orph, the opposition parties were to blame for the tough austerity measures of the bailout because they had kept undermining the government’s negotiating position in the talks with the troika. As always, he had done nothing wrong, but his speechwriter cleverly included a phrase that misleadingly suggested some humility on the comrade’s part
“We do not make a claim of infallibility,” the comrade said. This was the second lie of his speech, as he did not elaborate. He gave not a single example of his fallibility or admitted to having been wrong about anything.
THE BIGGEST disappointment was that he kept his emotions under control. He did not cry once during the address. But he made amends on Thursday, when he was in more familiar surroundings, addressing his commie comrades at a PEO conference.
He shed a few tears for them, when declaring that “my concern and priority has always been for the good of the workers and the ordinary man”. It was a bit gay, the way he choked up and took a folded handkerchief to gently wipe the tears from his eyes. He sniffed a bit and then used the hanky to blow his nose. That was it.
As far as tearful, presidential performances go, it came a very poor second to that of the Ethnarch during his referendum address. And the macho Ethnarch did not pull out a gay hanky to wipe the tears and blow his nose, like some little old lady reminiscing about her schooldays.
EVERYONE was singing the praises of big businessman Nicos Shacolas, after he announced that he would pay for all primary school children whose parents could not afford to give them a morning snack or the money to buy one at school.
Overnight, Shacolas the ultra-successful entrepreneur was declared a philanthropist, his generosity inspiring fawning comments by politicians, newspaper writers and parents’ associations all of whom concluded that such actions “prove that human compassion still exists”.
The offer of the snack would begin in the new year, after the Christmas holidays, though the logistics have not yet been decided. There appears to have been some disagreement between the education ministry perm sec and the chairman of the committee set up by Shacolas to decide how the help would be given.
The ministry would like the assistance in cash, so that it could give coupons which needy kids could use to buy a morning snack from the school canteen. Currently, the ministry gives coupons worth €1.60 to poor kids. The total cost of for the businessman – as after new year there will be 80 school days left and there are, according to the education ministry 4,670 poor children in primary schools - if he paid for the €1.60 coupons would be €597,760, a significant amount.
This was not what Shacolas had in mind. His committee, under the Cyprus University President Charis Charalambous, proposed that one of his companies would make sandwiches for poor children. Of course delivering the sandwiches to primary schools all over the island every day does not seem very practical and it involves a significant additional cost.
It remains to be seen how Shacolas’ commendable act of charity will be implemented.
THE INITIATIVE was announced by Shacolas at an event of the Sophia Foundation for children held in Nicosia last weekend. The event was held to mark the completion of the new building of the Makarios orphanage in Kenya, undertaken by the Foundation, which was set up and is run by Shacolas’ philanthropist daughter Marina, who helps poor children in Kenya.
At the weekend event, Marina honoured her father for the help he gave to the Foundation as well as her very good friends Mr and Mrs Pattichis (owners of the Phil media group) and her other very good friend Stavros Christodoulou (head of Phil’s lifestyle magazines department) whom she described as the ‘spiritual father’ of Sophia.
It was all rather cozy and familiar, but you could not criticise the event as it inspired Shacolas to make his announcement about offering help to poor primary school kids. The gushing praise for his daughter’s philanthropy by some speakers during the event, had obviously fired up the father’s philanthropic instincts.
AFTER reading last week’s item about the AKEL ‘award for contribution to sport’ which was given to Charalambos Koukoularides posthumously, a Coffeeshop regular informed us of another, much bigger, contribution made by the deceased. It was a contribution to the boosting of state teachers’ wage, for which he received no award or recognition.
In 1981 Koukoularides was working as sports advisor for the then president Spy Kyp. A PE teacher by profession, Koukoularides persuaded his boss to make the pay of PE teachers the same as secondary teachers. Until then, teachers could climb two pay scales higher. Spy asked what this would cost and how many PE teachers there were and once he realised it would cost a small amount of money he did the favour. This was around February of that year.
In May, when the secondary teachers heard what had happened, their representatives went to Spy to protest about this injustice, insisting that they should always be able to go two pay scales higher than their PE colleagues, because they received their qualifications from university after four years’ study while the gymnasts needed only three years study at the pedagogical academy. Spy agreed and put secondary teachers on to higher pay scales.
By October, primary school teachers, who were on the same pay scales as PE teachers, heard what had happened and also demanded that they were given the two higher pay scales awarded to the PE folk. Their wish was also granted by Spy, but this did not leave Koukoularides happy as the object of the exercise - to put PE teachers of the same scales as teachers was not achieved.
All this piece of innocent rusfeti did achieve was for Spy to increase the top earnings of all the teachers significantly. Is it any wonder we have the second best-paid teachers in the EU and a bankrupt state as an added bonus.
HIGH-EARNING, underworked teachers were out on the streets protesting last Wednesday because the memorandum stipulated that they would have to do an extra period of teaching a week. Their laziness is legendary.
Of course, to cover the real motive, the union claimed the work-shy secondary school teachers did not want to do the extra period because this would lead to some 500 teachers working on contracts not having their contracts renewed in September. The demonstration went ahead even after assurances by the education ministry perm sec that all contracts would be renewed in September.
The attempt to deflect attention away from their laziness was evident during the demo, with placards stating ‘No cuts to education’ and ‘No to the sell-out of education’. Teachers are so committed to education that record numbers have abandoned it, in the last few months, taking early retirement for fear that after a bailout their retirement bonus and pension would be slightly reduced.
THE ONLY people who are entitled to protest in the streets and start riots against the bailout are smokers of hand-rolling tobacco, the price of which has doubled thanks to the government’s new taxes. A 40g pouch that cost €5.20 will now sell for €9.50.
What are we smokers supposed to do now? We can’t give up because we want to help the government achieve the forecasted tax revenue target. If we gave up, the government would not meet its tax revenue targets and there might be a need for second bailout.
SOME restaurants have lowered their prices as a result of the recession, but the fish taverns continue to charge the full whack, especially if the customer is stupid enough, like I was two weeks ago, to order a big fish.
It does not matter if the restaurant is at the higher or lower end of the market, when you order a big fish, you will be pay for it in gold, at the current world price, because it has always been marketed as an expensive food item.
We were a company of four at the Strovolos fish restaurant Family Nest two weeks ago and decided to share a big fish, despite my warning that, in my experience, ‘big fish’ is synonymous with ‘overpriced’.
Two of us went to the display fridge to choose our fish and the waitress pulled some big sea creature from under the ice to show us and informed us it was a ‘vlachos’. My fellow diner immediately nodded his assent and we went back to our table, with me grumbling with a touch of slight exaggeration that we would pay a fortune for it.
Of course, I stupidly did not ask how much it would cost, so I could not complain when the bill arrived and I was proved correct. The Vlachos had cost €108 (its weight was written on the bill, next to the price so we would not think we had been ripped off, paying €60 per kilo) which meant we were charged €27 a head.
If some effort had been put into preparing it, the price might have been justified, but how much effort is needed to place a fish on the charcoal for 15 minutes, chuck it on a serving dish, sprinkle a bit of parsley over it? And it was accompanied by a bowl of lemon and olive oil dressing that was not even properly mixed.
I am not quite sure what the moral of this story is, but it might be that for big fish, restaurants will always charge the maximum price a fool would pay. Not even the recession has changed this pricing policy because there is no shortage of us fools.
SIXTY-SEVEN days left for the comrade to commit his first ever mistake as president.