Do you know why they do not leave us alone? You did not suspect at all, because for a few years now Cyprus has been under the microscope of various investigations that end up “revealing” what concerns our behavior in the field of professional services, our relationship with specific markets and a specific category and type of customers and the attitude of our professionals in this field? Also, are there any of us who do not know that similarly and worse things are happening in London and New York and in Paris and Amsterdam and Dublin and elsewhere? Think about them for a while…
The answer lies neither in a “struggle” between different levels of ethics, nor in a one-sided commitment to our leadership or to our lawyers, accountants and bankers, and, of course, not in the rivalry between “competing tax structures” throughout world. The answer has some elements from them, but that is not the point.
The substance is somewhere else. When Cyprus decided, only in recent years, to seek institutional membership in the “West” and to get closer to this club of countries, after decades of regressions, awkward balances and other adventurous behaviors, it actually decided, but did not understand it well, that it should do something very important and essential in terms of how it works: To establish credible institutions of control and prosecution. Such mechanisms that, first, to be able to reliably and comprehensively know really what is happening “in their place” and by whom and why and, second, mechanisms and institutions that are objectively available to cooperate, when needed, with the corresponding mechanisms of large countries of the western world. Basically mechanisms that can protect and support the operating system of the West against anyone who plots it internally or externally.
When, for example, an Authority, e.g. in Washington, wants to “pick up the phone” and talk to a similar authority in Nicosia, wants to know that, to a very large extent, the dialogue between them will serve both, or the other “partners” who may affected, just as well. Any such Authority does not want to talk to one of our Authorities that is more eroded than the system of risk assurance and control of the whole system “can withstand”. And in order not to end up with conspiracy theories, which are also fashionable among fools now, we will not go to many examples, but only to one that does not concern what has been published in recent years, but to one of the distant past.
In the 1970s the Cypriot flag had the “honor” to fly at the stern of a whaling hunter named MV Sierra (he had other names and changed the different flags and registers of this particular boat) which was managed by a client company of a well-known law firm of our island. This ship, whose history filled black pages in illegal whaling, along with some other countries, was repeatedly persecuted by both governments and authorities and environmental organizations, and when it was once requested to be removed from the Cypriot register, our side He replied that its existence did not contradict the provisions of the then Cypriot legislation. The answer of our side is in a relevant report of the Trade Committee of the American Congress and whoever wants can easily search it on the internet and read it. The details of that case no longer matter. The ending matters. Do you know what happened to Sierra? It was mined by a militaristic environmental organization and sank in the port of Lisbon in 1980.
