Christofias: only banks made bailout necessary

PRESIDENT Demetris Christofias charged that the truth concerning the economy has been completely twisted, as he defended his economic policy and blamed banks and the capitalist system for the global crisis.

“We should be proud of our governance,” he said in a speech on Sunday. “The factors are external: it’s the global crisis of this exploitative and inhuman system - capitalism, but also its people in our financial system.”

The president described what happened in the banks in the run up to Cyprus seeking a bailout as a “robbery”.

And he said European leaders and international lenders agreed with him that without the need to recapitalise the Greece-exposed banks, Cyprus would not have been forced to seek financial assistance.

Speaking to ruling AKEL supporters and refugees from the Kyrenia district, Christofias asked them not to be affected by the daily brainwashing, undertaken by political opponents and many media outlets.

Christofias blamed the crisis on capitalism, which causes hunger and poverty, even to people of the European Union “for which they boasted that it was a family based on institutions and the values of solidarity and respect for the people”.

The president said there was no respect and that this was proven by the millions of unemployed, the millions living below the poverty level in the EU because the neo-liberal forces want to burden the poor with the effects of the crisis.

Christofias said his administration had tried in the past few years to increase social protection and help to refugees.

“We have doubled the assistance to refugees so that they could build a house. We have effectively doubled minimum pensions,” he said.

The list of benefits the administration has brought is endless, he said, and without the theft in the banks, there would have been no serious economic problems.

“We would have had to take some structural measures to tackle the fiscal deficit, but it would have been done without the support mechanism,” Christofias said.

He added that the government had fought the troika hard to defend the workers’ basic conquests “and I think we have succeeded”.

The president said the suspension of wage indexation or CoLA is temporary and the 13th salary (for government workers at least) remained intact.

The troika had wanted both scrapped.