Onasagoras
A bombshell statement from Chrisis Pantelides: some people pocketed money and handed the project to the Chinese! Wait, does he mean Cypriots, on the island of saints no less, perhaps the crème de la crème among us, took kickbacks to saddle us with a project of dubious quality costing hundreds of millions? I’m stunned. I thought we lived in the land of the immaculate, the spotless, the uncorrupted. Apparently not…
The European Union is asking us to return 67 million, and naturally they won’t be sending the remaining 30 million or so of the approved grant for Vasilikos. They even sent us their IBAN (!!!) so we can make the deposit. Folks, careful with those IBAN numbers. You wouldn’t want to accidentally wire 67 million to the wrong account.
As for CyBC, it didn’t run the story. I don’t think there was government interference. They must've not had the time in the bulletin, since they had to air an extended segment on cat neutering. Meow, kittens. Anyway, for a place like CyBC, 67 million is peanuts, as they say in my village. Psst, to the CyBC News Department: here’s a scoop for you - there are other ways these days for people to find out the news.
Some people pocketed money and handed the project to the Chinese. -Chryssis Pantelides
I stumbled on a post on X by some user, clearly with far too much free time, who calculated how tall 67 million would be if stacked in €20 bills, one on top of the other. Answer: 335 meters, five meters taller than the Eiffel Tower. If, however, we stacked €1 coins, we’d reach 156 kilometers, roughly the distance from Nicosia to Paphos. Let’s see if CyBC ever covers that minor tidbit. Unless tonight they go for the other burning issue of the week: dog neutering.
According to a survey, supermarkets and electricity bills are stressing Cypriots, since despite the government trolls’ celebrations about our economy soaring (soaring higher than the towers of Limassol), the painful reality is that for many of our compatriots, the month just doesn’t… add up. Shocking that we even needed a survey to state the obvious.
As everyone knows, the usual suspects first delayed and then sabotaged the e-basket (e-kalathi), which ended up becoming an e-crapbasket, while we supposedly have the second-most expensive electricity in Europe. I say “supposedly second” because in reality, once you factor in the tens of millions we pay in fines and the scandalously endless projects, we easily hold the number-one spot for energy costs. First, number one, numero uno. In Japan, some officials would have committed seppuku out of shame. Here, they wag their fingers at us.
