Or maybe another GC (Loucas Charalambous) is lying.
Corruption on the rise: I wonder why?
By Loucas Charalambous
“HOW IS it possible Mr President, every stone we lift, under it, we find you and your office?” I asked this question, a few months ago, in this column, commenting on the multi-faceted activities of the law office founded by President Papadopoulos and now run by his offspring.
Last Sunday, Politis lifted another stone and under it, yet again, it found the Tassos Papadopoulos and Associates law office. It published a letter, sent to the Chinese company Norinco, in which the law firm demanded, in strong terms, payment of commission owed to its client (a mysterious firm by the name of Chams Ltd) for the purchase of munitions by the Cyprus government.
The most interesting part of this letter was that the Papadopoulos law office threatened to report the Chinese company to the House Defence Committee and the Ministry of Defence if it failed to make the payment within seven days. I should mention that the company was not found in the lists of the Registrar of Companies, even though Alithia revealed a day later that it belonged to a member of the president’s party DIKO.
What is astonishing is the audacity of the president’s children. Norinco was being warned that it would be ‘reported’ to the Defence Ministry. The threat was quite clear: if you do not pay up we will report you to the minister of our father who is the President of the Republic and you will never land another government contract. It is unprecedented for the son of the President of the Republic effectively to cite his father’s power, in order to achieve his professional objectives.
The really big question, though, is how Papadopoulos, who sees himself as a professor of political ethics, could have been representing arms merchants in 2003 when he was a party leader and a member of the legislature which evaluated tenders for the supply of guns, including tenders, it would appear, by his office’s clients. This is the much-trumpeted political morality of our president, who had nothing to say at least by the time that this was written. He stayed quiet as did his otherwise talkative son Nicholas, who, apart from representing mystery companies that vie for big government contracts, also deals with the awarding of patriotism certificates to Greek Cypriots.
Three days after this story was published, the DISY leader Nicos Anastassiades rolled over another stone, under which, a few months ago, we discovered the offspring of the president. I refer to the case of the floating terminal for Liquid Natural Gas. Citing written documentation, the DISY chief revealed the scale of this dodgy story in which the son of the president is immersed up to his neck.
About a year ago, a newspaper printed a copy of a receipt for £50,000 that had been donated to Papadopoulos’ election campaign fund in 2002 by a British company that had business interests in Cyprus. Three months ago, documents were submitted in a Nicosia court showing how millions of pounds worth of foreign exchange had been distributed among foreign nationals on the instructions of associates of the Tassos Papadopoulos law office. The money had come from the hundred of millions siphoned out Yugoslavia by the Milosevic regime with the help of the above-mentioned law office.
By sheer coincidence, last Tuesday, it was reported that the organization ‘International Transparency’ had placed Cyprus in 39th position in its world league table on corruption. When Papadopoulos took over the presidency from Clerides, Cyprus was in 27th place. In 2003, when he took over the presidency, Papadopoulos had pledged that he would eliminate corruption, but during his five years in office, according to International Transparency, the level of corruption has been on the rise. I wonder why?
http://www.cyprus-mail.com/news/main.ph ... 2&cat_id=1
