House president Annita Demetriou spent over €15,000 for luxury hotel rooms for three nights for those accompanying her on a trip to London, according to a report released by the audit office on Tuesday.

The trip took place in July 2023, and the bill for her entourage, which consisted of eight people, including five parliament officials, a journalist and a cameraman from CyBC, and one security guard, came to exactly €15,172.

In addition, her own hotel room bill came to €3,621, meaning that a total of €18,793 was claimed as accommodation expenses for the trip.

The audit office report referenced the treasury department’s “manual for official travel abroad”, which states that luxury hotels “should be avoided” during official travel, “taking into account that the state bears the actual cost for officials who accompany the House president or MPs on official duty”.

It then offered its own recommendation, saying that officials should “identify alternative overnight accommodation options instead of luxury hotels for government officials, except in cases where this is deemed absolutely necessary”.

In addition, the report pointed out that during the same trip to London, Demetriou had claimed €7,674 in expenses for “VIP facilities” for herself and eight others at London’s Heathrow airport.

It said the expenses claim “does not include all the necessary information”, including the names of the individuals who made use of the facilities, and that “no adequate description of the service is given, nor is the price per person”.

The report also pointed out that €100,000 was granted to parliamentary parties from the “conferences, seminars, and missions abroad” budget for “awareness purposes”, and that this is practice violated two separate laws.

As such, it said, if the funds were deemed necessary, they should have been drawn from the budget for the sponsorship of political parties.

In addition to those irregularities, the report also pointed out that parliament spent €77,500 on furniture without carrying out a tender process, instead negotiating directly with the chosen provider.

This, the report said, “is only permitted in special exceptional cases”, wherein goods or services “can only be provided by a specific entity, for example for the creation or acquisition of an artistic work of art or an artistic event”.

“This is not applicable here, as this is the purchase of furniture,” the report wrote, while also adding that the audit office disputes parliament’s justification for the process.

“We do not consider the justification that the design of the project required the selection of specific high-quality furniture to be justified, since high-quality furniture is widely available,” it said, before adding that the furniture’s designer was also a director of the company from which it was bought, and that this fact constitutes a “concern”.

Meanwhile, the purchase of €60,620 worth of air conditioning units was also carried out without a tender.

The audit office pointed out that this was also illegal, given that the type of contract signed with the supplier is only allowed to be signed for contracts worth up to €50,000.

The report also criticised the fact that the operating expenses of the foundation for parliamentarism and participatory democracy are not recorded as a separate budget but are instead included in parliament’s own budget.

This, the report said, “carries the risk of there being ineffective monitoring of budget implementation, both for the foundation and for parliament itself”.

In addition, the report also made reference to irregularities which had been written about in previous such reports, including the fact that over €2 million of unspent extraordinary state funding for political parties for the 2018 presidential election had not been returned to the state by the eight political parties which were granted the funds.

The report stated that this money has still not been returned, and that “further delay may increase the risk of the amount not being recovered”.