So much for the respected ruling class of our country… – Article by Giorgos Koukoumas, member of the Central Committee of AKEL and AKEL MP

 

1O November 2021

For more than three years now, 150 Cypriot workers at the J&P Overseas (Ioannou and Paraskevaides) projects in Saudi Arabia have been struggling to be paid their years of accrued wages and their contributions to social insurance and providence funds (which the company has been withholding for years – but isn’t paying!). The subsidiary company shut down its activities there and the workers were left abandoned with no one on the employer’s side moving to provide either a solution or give an answer. As if the workers have an obligation to deal with the fact that the company’s partners and relatives were fighting over the sharing of their billions.

The most outrageous of all is the fact that we are not talking about anyone unknown or about someone who went bankrupt, but about the J&P (Ioannou and Paraskevaides) Group. That is to say, the colossus of the construction industry and the flagship of the Cypriot business class that…is thriving and doing a great job in our country and in the monarchies of the Persian Gulf. In other words, the same people wearing the hat of one company have been refusing for years to pay salaries, social insurance and providence funds of their employees (besides Cypriot workers also that of several thousand Asian workers too), while with the hat of another company they are undertaking public works in Cyprus worth hundreds of millions, while presenting themselves as role models of businessmen and national benefactors. Probably tomorrow they will win awards as businessman of the year, of the decade, of the century…

The company and the two…dynasties in question obviously know that this government is neither moved, nor dares to put any pressure on them. They also know that neither can the workers and employees enter into a costly and possibly long legal battle where the powerful will also field an army of lawyers. Yesterday in Parliament – where the issue was discussed for the second time on AKEL’s initiative in the Parliamentary Labour Committee – again no one from the company was present….

So much for the respected ruling class of our country…