PRESIDENT Nicos Anastasiades said in an interview with Bloomberg in Nicosia yesterday that Cyprus will lift restrictions on the movement of capital in January 2014.
In the interview the president stressed that his administration’s goal is to create the necessary conditions for growth to successfully deal with the problem of unemployment and to stabilize the financial monetary system.
“The goal right now is to create the conditions for growth and tackle the serious problem of unemployment, to stabilize the financial system,” Anastasiades said. “The controls are being lifted. They will end within a timeframe of January 2014.”
The lifting of capital controls will come as welcome news to those who have managed to sell their properties on the island but who have been unable to repatriate the total proceeds to their home countries.
The following day, the Finance Minister, Harris Georgiades, contradicted the President by saying that the restriction on ability to remit funds abroad would NOT be lifted.
The obvious disarray within the administration does nothing to allay the doubts of the domestic and international community as to their ability to manage the banking and economic crises.
Its all about trust. People in Cyprus have worked for years to build up a nice savings account only to find that over a weekend some of them lost up to 40 percent of that nest egg. The Cyprus government are now saying that you can start saving again. I think people would need some sort of guarantee from the government that this could never ever happen again. Until then the Cyprus economy will carry on falling
..Except transfers of Capital out of Cyprus. Per today’s Greek papers. So nothing really changes yet.