‘There are no limits to the hypocrisy in this country’

By Charles Charalambous Published on July 29, 2010

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THE CLOSE aide to President Demetris Christofias who resigned on Tuesday over a nepotism row said yesterday there were no limits to the hypocrisy in Cyprus.

In his first comments since submitting his resignation, Vassos Georgiou, who headed the President’s Private Office, and who was cleared of any blame in the scandal, said: “We are burying our heads in the sand if we think we do not live in a country where everybody knows that people regularly ask all kinds of political figures for favours. Have we only now discovered the wheel? Hypocrisy has reached new heights in Cyprus these days.”

The row began after Georgiou, who headed the President’s Private Office, submitted his resignation to President Demetris Christofias after TV channel ANT1 revealed on Monday night that someone in the President’s Private Office had sent a request to the Defence Ministry for six national servicemen to be transferred or seconded to other posts.

Stefanou said on Tuesday that a swift internal investigation had established Georgiou “had no knowledge” of the message, which was sent in February by a long-serving member of the presidential staff who worked for one of his private secretaries.

The Defence Ministry also said on Tuesday that the six servicemen’s cases were handled by the relevant National Guard bodies in a normal manner and without any kind of political intervention.

Georgiou said yesterday that ordinarily, any message to a Ministry from the President’s Private Office would go through him, which is why, despite the fact that a member of his staff sent the offending message without his knowledge, he still submitted his resignation out of a sense of political responsibility.

“I’m not the kind that shifts the blame onto other people. From the moment you are a political official, if anything goes wrong, you take political responsibility for it”, he said.

He added that “as soon as I was informed, the woman who made the mistake – and who otherwise did an exceptional job – was transferred to other duties.”

Georgiou said he did not inform Christofias about the offending message when he had found out about it, which he described as a “very serious error”. He reiterated that Christofias first heard about the matter from Monday’s TV broadcast, and the President was “absolutely right” in saying he should have been informed of the incident as soon as it had been discovered.

Speaking to state broadcaster CyBC, the former presidential aide was blunt about what he described as the hypocritical response to the news of the offending message, saying Georgiou said that “among the thousands of things we do”, it is normal for the President’s Office to be approached by members of the public, irrespective of any party affiliation. “If someone approaches us on a humanitarian matter, am I supposed to say ‘Off you go, I won’t listen to you’?”

He added that he would also listen to an unreasonable request, but the point is that he would not then pursue it. “I have never promoted an unreasonable request, and challenge any official in the civil service – and I have had regular contact with any number of civil servants – to say that I have ever promoted an unreasonable request.”

“There are no limits to the hypocrisy in this country. The Defence Ministry issued a statement yesterday saying that almost all politicians make requests to it on a daily basis.”

Opposition DISY MP Ionas Nicolaou, who has been the most outspoken about the case, said yesterday that Georgiou’s comments amounted to an admission that he was involved in relaying requests for favours – in other words, rusfeti.

“Irrespective of whether he knew of this particular request, he himself admitted that he did this kind of thing as a matter of course. Mr Georgiou has admitted that he received such things, he received requests, and indeed he personally judged whether or not they were justified, and then sent them out left and right to various government services”, Nicolaou said.

“All those things that Mr Georgiou was referring to – what are they? Are they not rusfeti?” The DISY MP rejected any attempt to present requests for favours as “citizens’ requests”, or even “fair citizens’ requests”, saying that Article 105 of the Criminal Code does not discriminate between “justified” and “unjustified” requests.

“What about that poor member of the public who doesn’t know Mr Georgiou, doesn’t know the phone number for the presidential palace, or doesn’t know where AKEL’s offices are?” Nicoloau said this amounted to the public and society as a whole being “held prisoner by the party”, adding: “What difference is there between this and rusfeti?”

Nicoloau called on Attorney-general Petros Clerides to launch his own investigation into the “possibility that a criminal offence has been committed”, starting with the confiscation of the computer used to send the offending message “before its contents can be corrupted”.

Government spokesman Stefanos Stefanou later yesterday challenged Nicolaou to withdraw “inflammatory statements that drag down the level of political discourse”.

In a written statement, Stefanou accused Nicolaou of “vilifying the President’s person, misleading people regarding the workings of state institutions and making inflammatory statements against the climate of unity that the public demands from the country’s politicians”

Stefanou described Nicolaou’s further comments yesterday about the circumstances surrounding Tuesday’s resignation as “dogmatic” and “hypocritical”, accusing the DISY MP of conveniently making wordy declarations about meritocracy now, while when his party was in power for ten years he chose to remain silent about any of DISY’s shortcomings.

AKEL spokesman Stavros Evagorou said that Nicolaou was perhaps “confusing the political arena with the courtroom”, or simply being hypocritical, by suggesting we should shut out eyes to the fact that every party representative – including Nicolaou – receives requests for help with specific concerns or problems from members of the public every day, and this behaviour has become ingrained in the public consciousness.