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Bankrupt Cyprus And The Russian Connection
Wolf Richter www.testosteronepit.com
The Republic of Cyprus, with its 840,000 people, has been in the Eurozone for less than five years. Yet it burned through mountains of euros faster than anyone could count. Now it needs a bailout whose magnitude balloons every time someone blinks.
The financial problems came to a head last year when the markets refused to go along with the country’s profligacy. So Cyprus went begging to Russia and got a €2.5 billion loan last November. Which quickly evaporated. In June, banks began to crater. Bailout time. €2.3 billion would be required for the two largest ones. The bailout Troika, the despised austerity gang from the EU, the ECB, and the IMF, took a gander at the stuff the banks called “assets.” Costs jumped to €6 billion, plus €4 billion for a government bailout. Then rumors seeped out that the banks alone would need €9 billion, for a total of €13 billion [read..... The Ballooning Cyprus Fiasco].
In early August, a hullaballoo arose when it was leaked that Central Bank Governor Panicos Demetriades had told lawmakers of an even greater fiasco. He’d been appointed only on May 2, and when he opened the closet doors of the banks, he discovered the real mess: €12 billion would be needed for the banks—70% of the country’s shrinking €17 billion economy! Plus whatever the government would need. A total of €16 billion perhaps. 94% of GDP.
But plot twist: his predecessor, Athanasios Orphanides, lashed out at him. He’d been in office from January 1, 2008, when Cyprus acceded to the Eurozone, to May 2, 2012. During that time, he was also on the Governing Council of the ECB. He’d overseen the whole debacle, had let it happen, had encouraged it. So he accused his successor of an awful sin, namely shining some light on the banks, thus “creating the impression that our debt is unsustainable.”
Orphanides grew into that milieu in the cradle of financial shenanigans and bailouts. With his ivy-league education and a Ph.D. in economics from MIT, he worked as Senior Adviser at the Fed’s Board of Governors. And when the financial crisis erupted in the US, he left the Fed to become Governor of the Central Bank of Cyprus—to start all over again.
So now, with budget cuts taking their toll, the economy is shrinking faster than expected, warned Finance Minister Vassos Shiarly. But the ongoing bailout negotiations with the Troika “are in advanced stages,” he said. So perhaps by October, they might agree on a bailout memorandum that would require the usual medicine of painful structural reforms in return for bailout billions
But Cyprus needs the moolah now. It’s already raiding internal accounts and slowing disbursements to keep the lights on. And there’s hope. Apparently, the Russian government just approved a €5 billion loan—but not out of the goodness of its heart.
In October 2010, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev went to Cyprus to scratch the backs of Russian expats and the Cypriot elite. Cypriot President Dimitris Christofias, a communist, and educated in Russia, was there also. Turns out, the first half of that year, tiny Cyprus had been the largest foreign investor in Russia, ahead of the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Germany.
It wasn’t Cypriot money flowing into Russia. It was Russian money flowing back. Russian companies have long established their headquarters in Cyprus to benefit from its status as a tax haven, a trend that picked up when Cyprus acceded to the EU and then the Eurozone. According to the Russian Embassy in Cyprus, via Kathimerini:
In the last five years alone, the Russian economy has seen Cypriot investments of over $52 billion, of which $41.7 billion was invested in the 2007-10 period, or 2.7 times more than German investments in Russia in the same period.
At the same time, Russians are investing in Cyprus, among them businessman Dmitry Rybolovlev who bought a 10% stake in Bank of Cyprus, which is getting bailed out. And the offshore natural gas resources have attracted a slew of Russian companies.
And all that chaos in Europe? Won’t it further demolish the US economy? Not quite. Read.... Europe Funds The Last Ponzi Game Standing, by Lee Adler.
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the russian oligarchy has three ports of call : 1° Londonistan where the big money is stacked and Maggie's non-dom status gives them free access to Jersey-Isle of MAn trust territories, like the Templars of old. "Your money stays tax free if you park it in Barclays etc.." was the "I scratch, u scratch" deal on Maggy's farm. 2° Cyprus where the smaller thugs hang out since 1991 days and its balooned into EU laundry and scam base. 3° And finally Zurich where a lot of it comes to feed the numbered accounts of personal banking.
All the while the Putin club encourages them to reinvest in Oligarchy projects in homeland. The Sochi scam of 2014 winter olympics will be a good place for a quick in-out of oligarchy investment, privatising profits and socialising debts on government ledger.
Some good habits never die.
I see the return of slavery, Russia will own the people of cyprus though it is hard to imagine what use can be made of them. Perhaps they will hold control of them long enough to deplete the oil and gas and then grant them freedom to be employees at tourist hotels operated by Russians that have become citizens. The slavery will be de facto but no less onerous for that.
A visit to the so called imprisoned graves in Nicosia is a painful reminder of how British colonialism at times went far too far even by conqueror's standards. Men and young men executed for fighting against the Brits were buried within a very small plot inside the confines of the prison. The Brits in a most unfortunate demonstration of malice not only did not allow even the parents to be present at the funerals but also prior to leaving the island had the whole plot dug up with massive amounts of acid poured in so as to destroy the remains of the dead.
Britain has reaped however what she sowed and today she is swarming with millions of her former coloured Commonwealth citizens who have invaded her own shores and the sun has well and truly set on her empire.
With the 5,000,000,000 Euro loan the Russkies will be buying lots of calls on Cypriot gas when it starts to get pumped out. The Russians know what they're up to. The Cypriots seem to think they're laughing in the face of the Troika and getting a sweet deal from Putin but Putin is not doing this deal because of his love for his fellow commie Christofias. He'd also love to have a Russian naval base right in the heart of Limassol so he can keep an eye on the Brits/NATO in the Middle East.
I thought I was reading another Mini-Greek saga; 9B becomes 12B, then "You're going to bail us out? Uhh. how about 16B?"
Then the Russian angle comes into the story. What a jaw dropper! Russian corporate tax haven, imagine that! Then Navymugsy mentions the
Cypriot Gas angle. Russia already has Europe by the left testicle over gas dependence, now they are going for the right one.
Gotta love them Russians, psychopaths to the core!
Russian have their only base outside Russia in Syria, which is pretty much in the middle east.
It's clear they want a base there not for the middle east but for the mediterranean scenario ;)
This island has known nothing but suffering at the hands of one conqueror after another. The fling with borrowing and buying up to the GFC was just a brief respite from its usual troubles.
The place became full of foreign workers doing work that Cypriots no longer wanted to do and full of prostitutes from the Eastern block.
A beautiful but tragic place.
Richard the Lionhearted captured it from the Greeks in 1191 on his way to the Crusades. It became a Templar stronghold and Frankish kingdom, staging point for Saint Louis's 1250 aborted VII th Crusade; subsequently wrenched from Templar/Hospitaller rule by Genoese and Venetian incursions when all Frankish presence ended. It came back under Greek control after the Brits took it away from Turkey in post 1918 carve up of Mid East, when they made it their naval base, then relinquished it to Greeks in 1960s, when "the winds of change" made UK a second rate power.
The NAto projects in Turkey, pipeline networks and pumping stations, were all constructed by Greek entrepreneurs based in CYprus. So those local Cypriot Oligarchs were in with US MIC. Caspar Weinberger and George Schulz loved visiting Cyprus. Old Reagan hands who loved shaking Cypriot oligarchical hands for joint ventures of CIA type in Lebanon and Egypt; now under covert US protection (Sadat/Gemayel). Its a very interwoven world of Templars cum adventurers, the MIC club. And subsequently these Cypriots openly welcomed the Ruskis, full of money bags running from 1991 collapse, 'cos they too were ex-soviet MIC shills.
Lebanese Civil War - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Economy of Russia - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (see Elstin Period scams).
Birds of a feather flock together!
Now Putin wants to share cypriot gas and copycat UK by making Limassol russian "new Templar" base.
Some traditions are eternal !
Poor old Cyprus where Venus was born and Mount Olympus reigns over the lands.
Indeed a tragic place ... and Cyprus is at the moment holding the Presidency of the European Union, with Cypriots instructing and directing banking system regulation reform for all of Europe!
It wasn't that long ago there was bloody revolution in Cyprus, the war in the late 1950s to get independence from Britain. Lots of violent death on the streets, British soldiers torturing Cypriot prisoners to death, and so on.
One of the streets in Nicosia in Cyprus, became known as the 'Murder Mile' ... this phrase then became part of the lyrics of Elvis Costello's hit song in 1979 lampooning British militarism, 'Oliver's Army' (song title refers to the invention of the modern-style mass-citizen military by England's Oliver Cromwell in the 1640s - 1650s when the Brit monarchy was briefly abolished).
During the Brit colonial rule of Cyprus, beginning in the early 20th century - when the Brits took the place from the crumbling Turkish Ottoman Empire - they faced continued rebellion from among the Greek-speaking majority of Cypriots, many of whom wanted union with independent Greece. Merger with Greece was a main goal of many revolutionary Cypriot leaders in the 1950s who were fighting the Brits.
The spiritual kinship of the majority of Cypriots today, with their suffering Greek cousins should not be underestimated. Mentally, many Cypriots see themselves simply as 'Greeks'.
In the 1950s, to counter the independence agitators, under a typical Brit divide-and-rule strategy, the Brits greatly agitated Turkish nationalism among the Turkish speaking minority, which eventually contributed to the invasion of Cyprus by Turkey in the 1960s after Cyprus became independent. So Cyprus, and the old city Nicosia, remain divided today between Greek-speaking and Turkish sectors.
Cyprus is yet one more country caught in conflict left by bloody and quite recent colonial rule, with those who experienced the 'Murder Mile' still living. It should not be surprising Cyprus remains a mess.
i m used to think that swiss invented "modern-style mass-citizen military".
in 1400 every male between 16 and 65 yo was drafted from home and had to go for drills of the famous swiss pike square.
if this is not modern style mass citizen military, then i dont really know what modern style mass citizen military is............
"During the EOKA struggle that ran from 1955–1959, the street acquired the informal nickname The Murder Mile in reference to the frequent targeting of the British military by nationalist fighters along its course.[4][5]"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ledra_Street
Get your story right, buddy!
Orphanides...looks like you are on your own...
RT Under DNS DDoS Attack
"the domain record does not expire until Sept 22, 2021"
well. this just can't be true.
evidently rt is unreachable from the us. instead, your browser is redirected to network solutions.
who and why?
meanwhile, there is a plugin for firefox from stealthy http://www.stealthy.co/
install. restart. click stealth-fighter icon on the upper right of your window. it should turn green. then pull down the menu (tiny arrow beside stealth icon) and click 'preferences'
bottom button "connect to internet as if you were .."
CA (canada) seems to work ok
tip-o-the-hat to wikipedia
I can't even imagine why that might be, it must be a technical hitch, it couldn't possibly be that Washington behaving like Beijing?
NAH!
And the headlines are so prosaic today too.
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And an oldy but a goody:
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Guess the murdering cow was right.
Well seeing you can't get RT in the USSA, maybe you want to read this one:
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Now why would the MSM in the US not want people in the USSA discussing that that sort of thing?
long story short?
Not sure about a DDOS on RT but check out Global Research
http://www.globalresearch.ca/
click on one of their articles and see it flash out...?
I came across this earlier this evening and thought it was article specific....perhaps an internal server webpage issue?
Not good, regardless.
Ummm,you want conspiracy theories? Ja?
The NATO fellows confiscate a shipload of explosives in barrels and (temporarily) store them in the open air next a newly built power plant on Cyprus.Kaboom...no more power plant and a few houses too.
But then what do I know....
These days that must pass for NATO's own Welome Wagon in local Russian money laundering satellites...or in emerging gas concessions or...where local competition for energy generation will go to the sine qua non Globalist provider...not to worry, GE to the rescue!
http://gastopowerjournal.com/index.php/projectsafinance/item/724-ge-aims...
another country, same shit
Govt is garbage in any language, time to shut it up once and for all
Below is an accurate review of China, the USA, and Russia triangle and a stern warning Putin has received from China.
Chinese newspaper "People's Daily", the official organ of the Communist Party of China, published an analytical article that detailed the problems of modern Russia. Earlier Chinese media exercised caution in judgment, but this time, "People's Daily" proved to be extremely sarcastic and critical.
Media, commenting on such strong criticism from China, suggests that the article from "People's Daily" is a kind of warning to Putin that Russia should not be moving closer to the United States.
To date, the United States is a major global competitor of China, so Russia's position on this issue is of great importance for China. Meanwhile, the Russian elite is not about to abandon its rapprochement with the West because this is where it keeps its money they are very afraid to lose.
My actual reaction to this entire article is; so what. Much ado about nothing. it's small scale, local snatch and grab. Big deal. get over it.
Anybody who has an "uneasy" relationship with environmentalists, is okay with me. France has a permanent built in advantage over us and the rest of europe, because they have an effecient government run nuclear power grid that sells 100's of millions of Euros worth of electricity to Germany, who have convinced themselves that they're "holier" than all lthat and they're running on solar power; and unicorn farts. they aren't. Reality is a bitch; and when you get the bitch on your side, everything works better for you. Playing make-believe is not a good winning strategy.
just wait til the french have their own "fukishima"
then we will speak on who sell energy to who ;)
btw yesterday just happened an incident in one of their nuclear power plants in Alsace ;)
it turned out to be a minor chemical incident w/o consequences; the local Greenpeace antennae found nothing to add to initial story. That is important as contrary signal. They are powerful as sleuths; greenpeace in france on nuclear.
This appears to have started with Chalabi and spread like a conspiracy.
The disaster continues.
http://ericsprott.blogspot.ca/
I love consiracy it spreads like peanut butter; and contains the same amount of useful information.