The government ruling forces were organising fiestas on East Med
AKEL warned about East Med’s economic and geopolitical problems
18 January 2022, ‘Astra’ radio station
AKEL warned from the very beginning that the East Med pipeline is a project with economic and geopolitical problems, the General Secretary of AKEL Stefanos Stefanou said yesterday, recalling that the ruling DISY party organised fiestas during the signing of the trilateral agreements. S. Stefanou noted that “the government ruling forces were fighting amongst each other as to who would make statements, while now they have disappeared”.
More than two weeks after the US State Department’s non-paper was leaked to the Foreign Ministries of Greece, Cyprus and Israel, ruling that the East Med pipeline project is neither economically viable, nor recommended for the EU’s new environmental policies and therefore Washington is withdrawing its support for the project, the Cypriot government has decided to speak!
The President of the Republic, who for years now has been celebrating and posing for pictures with Netanyahu and Mitsotakis, the latest being the one at Zappeion in Athens where the intergovernmental agreement on this pipeline was signed, issued a written statement yesterday saying that the political decision of the three “was taken, subject to economic viability studies, underwater seabed morphologies, which would make a similar project feasible in relation to the environmental impact”.
Furthermore, the President repeats the constant excuse that “the cost of studies was borne by the European funds”. “The governments of the countries involved and the European Union have worked out alternatives, should the project be deemed unfeasible for whatever reasons,” he says. Finally, he states that “the energy plans of the Republic of Cyprus will be implemented in the most appropriate way”.
Stefanos Stefanou pointed out yesterday in a statement on state television that the issue of hydrocarbons is intertwined with the solution of the Cyprus problem and AKEL has put forward proposals on natural gas that can break the current deadlock in the Cyprus problem. When AKEL calls on the government to put pressure on Turkey, the government ruling forces only go to the EU and ask for sanctions, he observed.
