Odysseas Michaelides may have been removed from his post, but some of his work still haunts President Nikos Christodoulides. Last week, the report Michaelides had released at the end of 2023 about the money irregularly paid to Christodoulides over a period of five years, when still serving at the foreign ministry and including his time as acting government spokesman, was back in the news, dominating a meeting of the House audit committee.
According to the Audit Office report, he had been paid a total of €55,000 he was not entitled to over this period and had to return it to the state. Some €20,000 arose from the payment of a much higher overseas allowance rate than his pay grade justified when, as spokesman, he accompanied the president abroad. He was also paid 75 days of leave, amounting to €18,000, when he left the civil service to become foreign minister, which according to the Audit Office he was not entitled to.
Worst of all, was that he was still claiming his allowance for an overseas posting for four months after he had returned to Cyprus to take another government post. The total was €16,500 which was paid unlawfully and, although the foreign ministry questioned the payment, it was eventually approved. New auditor-general, Andreas Papaconstantinou, tried to defend Christodoulides at the audit committee, saying that although the payment should have been terminated on his return to the island, “it was not such a clear-cut case because he had been recalled to Cyprus while his family was still abroad and there were particularities.”
There were other points made in the Audit Office report which suggested Michaelides was on a mission to cause maximum embarrassment to the president. He brought up the use of a state car, which he was using for his personal needs – he therefore had to return the petrol money to the state. This pettiness was also illustrated in Michaelides’ objections to the use of a police-driven car to take the president’s daughters to school.
While it could be argued that the payments for overseas travel and days of leave owed were not unlawful, but the result of a flexible interpretation of regulations, there is no such defence for the payment of the overseas posting allowance which was made under false pretences. The €16,500 should have been returned and it is astonishing that someone as concerned about his public standing as Christodoulides refuses to do so, allowing this shabby affair to destroy his carefully cultivated ‘Mr Clean’ image.
The question is why he has obdurately refused to return this money? He could have told the treasury to take the state pension he receives every month until the amount was paid off. Does he fear that this would be an admission of wrongdoing on his part? Could he not have said that he had realised he had made a mistake which he wanted to correct, rather than be seen as a president who has been milking the state, maximising his income irregularly at the expense of the taxpayer?
The only plausible explanation is that the president believes that he has done nothing wrong. Having been a civil servant for all his working life, he most probably nurses the sense of entitlement that is endemic among this privileged class of workers. Finding ways of maximising your earnings from the state is part of the culture of the civil service, encouraged by a very powerful union which behaves as if it owns the state. Government doctors, on annual salaries of €150,000, threatening to go on a two-day strike and causing maximum inconvenience to patients over unjustified back-pay demands are an example of this entitlement culture.
It was ironic that Michaelides, the state official who exposed irregular payments to the president, also suffers from the civil servants’ acute sense of entitlement. A couple of weeks ago he raised a huge fuss, accusing the attorney-general and the president of plotting to deprive him of his state pension and retirement bonus. It was inconceivable that he might not be paid his retirement bonus, even though there were grounds for this, given that his employment had been terminated for inappropriate behaviour. The attorney-general had sought the legal opinion of a private lawyer on the matter, but for Michaelides questioning his right to a bonus was a form of persecution.
Our society has created this class of privileged workers with their boundless sense of entitlement and unwavering belief that the country is permanently in their debt and that the taxpayer has an obligation to satisfy their every pay claim, even those that are legally dubious. It is a great shame that the one person who has the power to end this appalling practice – the president – is setting the worst possible example, because he is incapable of discarding his own civil servant sense of entitlement.
