Statement by AKEL Spokesperson Stefanos Stefanou on the Inquiry Committee’s interim report on the golden passports scandal
AKEL C.C. Press Office, 27th April 2021, Nicosia
AKEL will study the Committee of Inquiry’s interim conclusion on the ‘golden’ passports scandal and will express its position in a comprehensive manner. Besides, AKEL had pressingly demanded that the Inquiry’s Finding should be made public because there must be transparency, so that citizens can judge the Inquiry’s conclusions, but also the Commission of Inquiry itself and its work.
However, the Attorney General’s decision not to publish any names and data is a blatant attempt to obscure, given that even the references to the well-known Saudi tycoon, who gave his private jet to Nikos Anastasiades for his vacation in the Seychelles and in return, the President granted Cypriot passports to all of his family, were marked in black to hide these references.
In any case, by doing so the institutional entanglement and conflict of interest of Nikos Anastasiades and members of the DISY Government in the golden passports case can’t be concealed. This is self-evident and glaring. Nowhere else in the world does a President – indeed so provocatively and scandalously – take decisions that enrich his family businesses at such a fast rate and Ministers took decisions on applications submitted by law firms which are connected to them. These are the most outrageous aspects of the ‘golden’ passport industry set up by the Anastasiades government, which distributed 6,500 passports and discredited our country all over the world.
