During UN-organized beach and buffer zone clean-ups, though, youth from both the north and south of Cyprus work side-by-side with peacekeepers. Credit: UNFICYP

By Abigail Van Neely
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 27 2023 (IPS)

Along the 180-kilometer-long buffer zone separating the north and south of Cyprus, there is a surprising sign of unity: recycled ammunition boxes no longer hold bullets. They are home to baby birds.

Over the past five years, United Nations police have collaborated with local authorities to place 100 boxes throughout the uninhabited border area. An alternative to harmful pesticides, the man-made nests attract barn owls who prey on rodents. By supporting these kinds of projects, United Nations peacekeepers in Cyprus are helping to facilitate conservation efforts that impact communities on both sides of the island’s divide.

The UN peacekeeping mission in Cyprus (UNFICYP) is one of the world’s oldest active missions. Following violence between Greek and Turkish Cypriots in the 1960s, Cyprus was split in 1974 into a northern third run by a Turkish Cypriot government and a southern two-thirds run by an internationally recognized Greek Cypriot government. UN forces monitor the dividing militarized buffer zone.

UNFICYP peacekeepers have a double mission, environmental conservation, and ensuring peace between north and south Cyprus. Credit: UNFICYP

Fresh Tensions Persist

In August, UN peacekeepers were seriously injured by Turkish Cypriot security forces during a controversy over unauthorized construction work in an UN-controlled area, Reuters reports. According to the BBC, reunification talks remain slow.

Still, peacekeepers are trying to bring the two communities together through a shared interest in protecting the environment.

A small Mediterranean island, Cyprus is an important breeding, nesting, and foraging area for many animals. While activists say sensitivity to the importance of sustainability has increased, climate change is a greater threat than ever throughout Cyprus. Development from wealthy investors has fragmented habitats and led to the loss of natural areas.

Tourism has exacerbated water scarcity. Record high temperatures have aggravated social inequities for people who cannot afford air conditioning. Wildfires across the island have threatened to trigger minefields in the buffer zone. When everyone breathes the same air, air pollution is everyone’s problem.

“Environment doesn’t really know boundaries or borders and different nationalities,” Cyprus advocate Meryem Ozkan says. “But how we are acting, protecting, and preserving everywhere all around the island is affecting us all living on it.” 

UNFICYP Senior Police Advisor Satu Koivu strives to practice environmentally responsive policing in line with UN environmental management mandates. Patrols of the buffer zone have reduced illegal waste dumping and helped curb the long tradition of bird poaching along the island’s famous bird migration routes.

Meanwhile, mission-level initiatives include installing solar panels, driving hybrid vehicles, and using reusable water bottles.

Ultimately, Koivu says supporting local people is her priority. Partnerships with local authorities, civil society organizations, and community members are essential. Communication and outreach are critical tools, especially for bringing people together.

Many kids would cringe at the thought of enduring an hour-long bus ride on a hot summer day just to spend hours collecting trash. During UN-organized beach and buffer zone clean-ups, though, youth from both the North and South of Cyprus learn to appreciate the importance of their conservation efforts while working side by side with uniformed peacekeepers. The explicit goal is to discuss environmental solutions. Peacebuilding is a happy bonus.

Ozkan, the current operations manager for the North Cyprus Society for the Protection of Turtles (SPOT), collaborated with the UN on a couple of beach clean-ups. SPOT’s sea turtle conservation project centers aim to raise awareness through firsthand experiences. “If people don’t love what you love and feel the need to protect, they will not want to put the effort in,” Ozkan said.

Ozkan sees the UN’s open community events as important platforms for NGOs from both sides to communicate on equal footing without misunderstanding. Ozkan says engagement between organizations in the north and south has become more common in the last decade. Recently, SPOT partnered with NGOs around Cyprus to collect data about when sea turtles are trapped in fishing nets and engage fishermen through outreach activities.

UNFICYP Senior Police Advisor Satu Koivu strives to practice environmentally responsive policing in line with UN environmental management mandates. Here is admires a young barn owl; the population has been introduced into the buffer zone between north and south Cyprus. Credit: UNFICYP

Youth Activists for Climate Change

Youth activists who helped coordinate Cyprus’ second Local Youth Conference on Climate Change say the UN has helped them connect with each other and a wider audience. At one UN event, their team presented a draft policy proposal to install solar panels in the buffer zone to Cyprus government officials. They welcome not only the voices of both Greek and Turkish Cypriots but the perspectives of other minority and migrant communities as well.

“There is a huge need for environmental action across the aisle at the moment,” Victoras Pallikaras, a former UNFICYP Champion for Environmental Peace, stressed. Different governmental regulations on either side of the island can make coordination and compliance a challenge. While the south follows and receives support from the European Union’s environmental directives, Pallikaras notes, the north has different policies.

“The UN is kind of a pressure for both communities to bring them back together,” Pallikaras said. Even if it’s imperfect, “the most important thing is that the UN is making a huge effort.”

At first, Nicolaos “Nikos” Kassinis, one of the Cyprus Game and Fauna Service staff responsible for coordinating the barn owl nesting project, found it strange to be escorted by foreign UN officers in his own country. Over the past years, they’ve developed a “great trust.”

“Without these people, it will be impossible to do work in the buffer zone,” he now says.

“Wildlife doesn’t recognize fences and divides that are on the map,” the conservationist emphasizes. In the future, he would like to see the barn owl project expand to include the Turkish Cypriot side of the island — pesticide residue has been found in birds of prey that travel across Cyprus.

Koivu hopes that her environmental work will help the public also associate police with positive initiatives.

“As an individual, I cannot change the world. But I can start the ball rolling, and then together, we can make this difference and impact. So, I try to be positive,” she says. Less serious, her crisp blue uniform crinkles with her grin when she emphatically talks about the magic of seeing a new owlet.

“They are so cute, these babies!”

IPS UN Bureau Report

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By Roberto Savio
ROME, Jun 9 2015 (IPS)

Only 50 years of Cold War (and the fact that German Chancellor Angela Merkel grew up in East Germany) can possibly explain the strange political power of the United States over Europe.

After a bilateral meeting between Merkel and U.S. President Barack Obama (so much for transparency and participation), the Jun. 7-8 G7 summit opened in Germany and we found out that there had been a trade-off.

Roberto Savio

Merkel agreed that Europe should continue the sanctions against Russia – and so the other members of the G7 duly agreed – and Obama toned down the U.S. position on Greece.

That position had been forcefully expressed by U.S. Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew a few days earlier to European leaders: solve the Greek problem, or this will have a global impact that we cannot afford. This had suddenly accelerated negotiations, with the hope then that everything would be solved before the G7 summit.

But Greece did not accept the plan of the President of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, which was suspiciously close to International Monetary Fund (IMF) positions.

At the G7 summit, Obama softened the U.S. position on Greece, and even said that “Athens must implement the necessary reforms.”

Obstinacy on sanctions against Russia ignores the fact that, in a very delicate economic moment, Europe has lost a considerable part of its exports because of Russia’s retaliatory block on European imports. It is also difficult to see what advantage there is for Europe in pushing Russia into the arms of China. We will soon be seeing joint naval exercise between the two countries, which will only escalate tensions.

But let us look at Greece given that its tug of war with Europe has now been going on for five years.

Let us recall briefly. Greece had been spending much more than it could by distributing public jobs under any government, by giving easy pensions to everyone, and so on. Then, in 2009, the centre-left Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) won the elections and we found out that the figures Athens had been giving Brussels were false.

The real deficit stood at almost 12.5 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), confirmation of what the European Union and its bodies had long suspected but which it had done nothing about.“Europe is now led by Germany and the Germans are convinced that what they did at home is valid everywhere. Together with the countries of northern Europe, they look on the people of southern Europe as unethical, people who want to enjoy life beyond their means”

To avoid going into the agonising details of the continuous negotiations between Greece and the European Union, I jump to the January elections this year which the left-wing Syriza party won and its leader Alexis Tsipras was named Prime Minister on a clear programme: stop the austerity programme imposed by the “Troika” – IMF, EU and the European Central Bank (ECB) – on behalf of the European countries, led by Germany, Netherlands, Austria and Finland.

Greece is on its knees. Officially, unemployment has gone from 11.9 percent in 2010 to 25.5 percent today, but it is widely considered to be around 30 percent. Among young people, it is close to 60 percent. GDP has gone into a 25 percent decline, Greek citizens have lost about 30 percent of their revenues and public spending has been slashed to the point that hospitals have great difficulty in functioning.

Yet, the request (order) of the “Troika” is simple – cut everything the deficit has been eliminated.

So, for example, cut pensions, which have been already been cut twice. In any case, this would reap a paltry 100 million euros but would cripple people who are living on less than 685 euro a month. Or, raise VAT on tourism, from the present 6.5 percent to 13.6 percent, which would be a deadly blow to Greece’s only important source of income.

This is the plan presented by Juncker, whose arrival as head of the European Commission was accompanied by a grandiose Marshall Plan for Europe, a plan which has since disappeared totally from the scene.

In an article a few days ago titled ‘Europe’s Last Act?”, Joseph E. Stiglitz, Nobel laureate in economics, argues that the idea of austerity as a uniform recipe for Europe is missing reality.

“The troika badly misjudged the macroeconomic effects of the program that they imposed. According to their published forecasts, they believed that, by cutting wages and accepting other austerity measures, Greek exports would increase and the economy would quickly return to growth. They also believed that the first debt restructuring would lead to debt sustainability.

“The troika’s forecasts have been wrong, and repeatedly so. And not by a little, but by an enormous amount. Greece’s voters were right to demand a change in course, and their government is right to refuse to sign on to a deeply flawed program.”

It is on austerity that the paths of the United States and the European Union divide.

The United States has embarked on investing for growth, despite pressure from the Republican party for austerity, and the U.S. economy is picking up again.

But Europe is now led by Germany and the Germans are convinced that what they did at home is valid everywhere. Together with the countries of northern Europe, they look on the people of southern Europe as unethical, people who want to enjoy life beyond their means. As The Economist put it in an article on the Greek crisis: “In German eyes this crisis is all about profligacy”.

It did not help that another very minor crisis – that of Cyprus between 2012 and 2013 – confirmed Germany’s view about the profligacy of the south of Europe. In the case of Cyprus, the “Troika” settled the crisis at a cost of 10 billion euros.

There is widespread agreement that the crisis of Greece, which represents just two percent of the total European budget, could have been settled at the beginning with a 50-60 billion euro loan. But only since Tsipras became prime minister, and with popular support started to refuse to accept the creditors’ plan, has Greece has become a very important issue.

There is now talk of a “Grexit”, or Greece’s exit from the European Union. This would have a cascade effect, and it would mean the end of Europe as a common dream, of a Europe based on solidarity and communality.

In the G7, Obama has insisted on investments and demand as a way out of the crisis. Merkel has again repeated that Europe does not need stimulus financed by debt, but stimulus coming from the reform of inefficient economies. At this point, perhaps “everything is always about something else”, as the late award-winning Sri Lankan journalist Tarzie Vittachi once told me.

An enlightening comment on the Greek situation has come from Hugo Dixon writing in The New York Times of Jun. 7. The Greek prime minister “will have to choose between saving his country and sticking to a bankrupt far-left ideology. If he is smart, he can secure a few more concessions from creditors and a goodish deal for Greece. If not, he will drag the country into the abyss.”

And then, it is interesting to note that one of the main reasons for being so hard with Syriza is that the citizens of Spain, Portugal and Ireland, who were the first to swallow the bitter pill of austerity, would revolt if they saw a different path for Greece, and it just happens that those countries have conservative governments.

The entire European political system reeled with shock at the victory of Syriza, and again a few days ago at the victories of the left-wing anti-establishment Podemos party in municipal elections in Spain.

For some reason, the very authoritarian and conservative government of Viktor Orbán in Hungary, the victory of the very conservative Andrzej Duda as president in Poland, as well as the rise of Matteo Salvini’s anti-European and anti-immigration Lega Nord party in Italy create no panic, not even if Salvini looks to Russian President Vladimir Putin and Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s right-wing Front National, as figures of reference.

So, the real issue now in the case of Greece is to punish an anti-establishment figure like Tsipras and show that the radical left cannot run a country.

Who really believes that there will masses of citizens in Madrid, Lisbon or Dublin taking to the streets to protest if Europe does a somersault of solidarity and idealism, and lowers its requests or dilutes them over more time? (END/COLUMNIST SERVICE)

Edited by Phil Harris   

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

Lobbying is an integral part of democracy, but multiple scandals throughout Europe demonstrate that a select number of voices with more money and insider contacts can come to dominate political decision-making – usually for their own benefit.

In a report titled ‘Lobbying in Europe: Hidden Influence, Privileged Access’ released Apr. 15, Transparency International said that the lack of clear and enforceable rules and regulations is to blame and called for urgent lobbying reform.

The report from the global civil society coalition against corruption found that of 19 European countries assessed, only seven have some form of dedicated lobbying law or regulation, allowing for nearly unfettered influence of business interests on the daily lives of Europeans.

“In the past five years, Europe’s leaders have made difficult economic decisions that have had big consequences for citizens,” said Elena Panfilova, Vice-Chair of Transparency International. “Those citizens need to know that decision-makers were acting in the public interest, not the interest of a few select players.”

Using international standards and emerging best practice, the report examines lobbying practices as well as whether safeguards are in place to ensure transparent and ethical lobbying in Europe and three core European Union institutions – European Commission, European Parliament and Council of the European Union.

Slovenia comes out at the top with a score of 55 percent, owing to the dedicated lobbying regulation in place, which nevertheless suffers from gaps and loopholes. Cyprus and Hungary rank at the bottom with 14 percent, performing poorly in almost every area assessed, especially when it comes to access to information.

Eurozone crisis countries Italy, Portugal and Spain are among the five worst-performing countries, where lobbying practices and close relations between the public and financial sectors are deemed risky.

Noting that the three E.U. institutions on average achieve a score of 36 percent, Transparency International said that “this is particularly worrying, given that Brussels is a hub of lobbying in Europe and decisions made in the Belgian capital affect the entire region and beyond.”

According to the report, none of the European countries or E.U. institutions assessed “adequately control the revolving door between public and private sectors, and members of parliament are mostly exempt from pre- and post-employment restrictions and ‘cooling-off periods’, despite being primary targets of lobbying activities.”

“Unchecked lobbying has resulted in far-reaching consequences for the economy, the environment, human rights and public safety,” said Anne Koch, Transparency International’s Director for Europe and Central Asia. The research highlights problematic lobbying practices across a wide range of sectors and industries in Europe, including alcohol, tobacco, automobiles, energy, finance and pharmaceuticals.

“Unfair and opaque lobbying practices are one of the key corruption risks currently facing Europe,” said Panfilova. “European countries and E.U. institutions must adopt robust lobbying regulations that cover the broad range of lobbyists who influence – directly or indirectly – any political decisions, policies or legislation. Otherwise, the lack of lobby control threatens to undermine democracy across the region.”

Edited by Phil Harris    

By Roberto Savio
ROME, Apr 24 2013 (IPS)

For a long time it was a given that while Europe was based on defending a more just society, with social values and solidarity, the United States was based on the glory of individualism and competition, and anything public was considered “socialist”.

Roberto Savio, founder and president emeritus of the Inter Press Service (IPS) news agency. Credit: IPS

One of the main accusations of the last electoral campaign in the U.S. was that Barack Obama had an unspoken design to transform the U.S. into another Europe, beginning with healthcare reform.

Well, it’s time for an update – the defenders of market fundamentalism are now in Europe.

At the last meeting of Ministers of Finance on Apr. 9, the freshly-appointed U.S. Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew tried to convince Europeans to lessen their commitment to austerity as the best medicine for economic problems. The U.S. Treasury, together with the U.S. Federal Reserve, has launched a policy of economic stimulus, with concrete success.

Every month, the Federal Reserve alone is putting 80 billion dollars into the bond market. Incidentally, Japan is doing the same, on an even greater scale. Lew was met with a firm rejection: the best way to achieve growth in the long term (contrary to any evidence) is to cut deficits and reassure the markets, even at the cost of higher unemployment and social misery in the short term.

Europe’s most powerful minister, Germany’s Wolfgang Schauble, said: “Nobody in Europe sees this contradiction between fiscal consolidation and growth. We must stop this debate, which says that you have to choose between austerity and growth.”

He was echoed by the president of the European Union, Herman Van Rompuy: “There is no room for complacency. The European economies have a high level of debt, deep structural medium-term challenges, and short-term economic headwinds that we need to confront.”

"Share traders [are] both more reckless and more manipulative than psychopaths"
These short-term economic headwinds are the daily reality of all the countries of Southern Europe. Suffice it to point out that youth unemployment has climbed to 22 percent across Europe (Spain is close to 47 percent) to see that we are wasting a generation, which will have no access to a future pension or a house. Like it or not, a study by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) foresees that the generation now entering the labour market will retire with a pension of only 640 euro per month. Is that a sustainable society?

The reaction of British Prime Minister David Cameron to his country’s loss of Triple A status, was to reaffirm even more his commitment to austerity, including reductions in education and health spending. He conveniently used the funeral celebrations for former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, the forerunner of the dismantling of the welfare state, to place himself as the heir of the Iron Lady: TINA, There Is No Alternative.

Meanwhile, we now have the data for Cyprus. It is widely accepted that it will lose at least two percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) in the coming months and the social impact will be dramatic. Soon, it will be obliged to ask for another bailout.

But under the new formula imposed by Germany, which is to make bank investors and depositors pay for the bailout, they have already lost 60 percent of their money. It will be interesting to see how Germany will find a way for a new bailout.

The Bank of Cyprus has already sold all its gold reserves. What will they now extort, the sale of houses? This is what is widely rumoured will be asked for in Spain and Italy, where citizens would pay a one-off amount and bank depositors would be taxed on their deposits as a condition for any European money.

At the same time, Germany sits comfortably on its trade surplus with Southern Europe, which has reached, according to the OECD, the magical amount of one trillion euro. And the bailouts to Greece, Portugal and Ireland were directed towards reimbursing bad German bank investments.

Yet, the situation of the banks and the volume of toxic titles they still possess are unclear. A number of figures circulate: what it is agreed is that banks still need money to stabilise. The case of Bankia in Spain is emblematic. The government has poured in 72 billion dollars, more than what it cut in health and education. Have the banks become wiser and less speculative now that they know that they will be bailed out anyhow?

The latest news from Wall Street is revealing. The banks that created risky amalgams of mortgages and loans – the so-called derivatives, which created the immense disaster that ignited the present crisis (with the added contribution of European bank speculation over sovereign titles) – are creating exactly the same instruments of risky speculation. Forgotten is the last crisis five years ago. In the last quarter alone, banks have issued 33.5 billion dollars in bonds backed by commercial mortgages and proven disastrous speculation is back, just like collateralised debt obligations.

The reason is simple. Unless banks are put back to the pre-Clinton era when deposit banks were rigidly separated from investment banks, all the money that goes to the banks will go first to speculation, which has a higher return (and if anything goes wrong the state will bail them out again), and then to deposits and loans, which have a much smaller return.

So, the traders specialised in those derivatives are being hired back by the banks.

Two experienced forensic experts working for a Swiss university have devised computer simulation and intelligence tests to measure the egoism of 28 professional financial traders, and to check their willingness to cooperate with others. They discovered that the share traders were both more reckless and more manipulative than psychopaths. Thomas Noll, a psychiatrist and a prison administrator, told Germany’s ‘Der Spiegel’ that the “more egoistic” traders “were more willing to take risks than a group of psychopaths who took the same test”.

What surprised the researchers was the competitive attitude of the financial traders, which had a destructive edge. Instead of being business-like and aiming to reach the highest profit, explained Noll, “it was most important to the traders to get more than their opponents, and they spent a lot of energy trying to damage their opponents”.

How many crises do we have to bear before regulations eliminate risks from the banks and they are confined to the world of speculation? Or, in other words, before regulations isolate normal citizens from traders who are not wired like us?

(END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Excerpt:

Cyprus is finalising capital control measures to prevent a run on the banks by depositors anxious about their savings after the country agreed a painful rescue package with international lenders.

With banks due to reopen on Thursday, Finance Minister Michael Sarris said he expected the control measures to be ready by noon (1000 GMT) on Wednesday.

“I think they will be within the realms of reason,” Sarris said in a Cyprus television interview, without going into details.

Cypriots have taken to the streets of Nicosia in their thousands to protest against the bailout deal they fear will push their country into an economic slump and cost many their jobs.

European leaders said the deal averted a chaotic national bankruptcy that might have forced Cyprus out of the euro.

A banking official said on Wednesday that new controls will include restrictions on large-scale transfers from Bank of Cyprus and Laiki, two of the country’s largest and troubled lenders, which are both being restructured.

Authorities are looking to increase the daily withdrawal limit from 100 euros to 300 euros, for at least a week until the situation stabilises, according to the official who spoke to AP news agency.

Banks will have heightened security across the island nation for the “comfort of both bank staff and clients, with the police also present”, according to John Argyrou, the Cyprus managing director of private security firm G4S, which will deploy 180 of its staff to all bank branches.

“There may be some isolated incidents, but it’s in our culture to be civil and patient, so I don’t expect anything serious,” said Argyrou.

Run on banks

“Banks will open on Thursday … We will look at the best way to limit the possibility of large sums of money leaving, and not imposing punitive conditions on the economy, businesses and individuals,” Sarris said in the interview.

The central bank governor said earlier that “loose” controls would apply temporarily to all banks.

Earlier, the finance minister said they could be in place for weeks. Banks have been shut since final bailout talks got under way in mid-March.

Russia, whose citizens have billions of euros in Cypriot banks, cautioned Nicosia against imposing onerous controls on healthy banks.

“If there are such measures, this will not foster trust but only provoke additional problems for participants, depositors,” Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov, in South Africa for a summit of the BRICS emerging powers group, told reporters late on Tuesday.

State-controlled Russian bank VTB has a subsidiary in Cyprus, Russian Commercial Bank, which has not been affected by the bailout deal.

Siluanov cautioned that Russian willingness to restructure and extend a 2.5-billion euro loan to Cyprus in 2011 would depend on the island’s decision on capital controls.

“We will discuss (restructuring of the loan) in the context of the decisions the parliament adopts,” he said. “We are prepared to discuss within these parameters.”

Bank executive sacked

Meanwhile, the chief executive of the Bank of Cyprus, the island’s biggest lender, was sacked by the central bank governor as part of the bailout deal, state media said.

Yiannis Kypri was fired on the instructions of the so-called troika of the European Union, European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund, the Cyprus News Agency reported.

The terms of the 10-billion euro (13-billion-dollar) rescue have stirred popular anger within Cyprus at the country’s partners in the EU, notably Germany, the bloc’s main paymaster and fiercest advocate of austerity.

On Tuesday, up to 3,000 high school students protested at parliament, in the first major expression of popular anger since the bailout was agreed in the early hours of Monday morning in Brussels.

The deal largely side-stepped parliament, and has triggered opposition calls for a referendum.

“They’ve just got rid of all our dreams,” one student, named Thomas, said.

Outside the central bank, about 200 employees of the country’s biggest commercial lender, the Bank of Cyprus, demanded the resignation of central bank governor Panicos Demetriades, chanting “Hands off Cyprus” and “Disgrace”.

*Published under an agreement with Al Jazeera.

Political leaders in Cyprus are working on an alternative proposal to stave off bankruptcy after parliament overwhelmingly rejected an international bailout plan.

Nicos Anastasiades, president of Cyprus, has met party leaders and central bank officials on Wednesday to work out how they can raise billions of euros in funds to stave off bankruptcy.

The president also met representatives of his country’s potential creditors, from the International Monetary Fund, European Central Bank and European Commission. However, no statement was issued on the result of those talks.

The talks come a day after MPs rejected terms set by the EU and IMF to raise money in return for the 13-billion-dollar bailout by seizing up to 10 percent of people’s bank savings, with zero votes in favour, 36 against and 19 abstentions.

Meanwhile, with Russian banks and individuals heavily invested in the island, Cyprus’ finance minister has asked Moscow for help to avert a financial meltdown.

Government spokesman Christos Stylianides said that a meeting had begun at the central bank to discuss a “Plan B” on how the administration could raise funds and reduce the 5.8 billion euros (7.5 billion dollars) that must be found domestically.

Central Bank deputy governor Spyros Stavrinakis said that no decision had been taken on when banks would reopen after they were shut at the weekend.

He said that the new plan being worked on Wednesday had not yet been presented to the EU and IMF.

Russia talks

Michael Sarris, Cyprus’ finance minister, said that he had reached no deal on financing with his Russian counterpart, Anton Siluanov, but talks were continuing.

Cypriot officials disclosed that the country’s energy minister was also in Moscow, ostensibly for a tourism exhibition.

Cyprus has found big gas reserves in its waters near Israel but has yet to develop them.

“We’ll now continue our discussion to find the solution by which we hope we will be getting some support,” Sarris said after initial talks with Siluanov.

ECB support

Austria’s finance minister made clear the European Central Bank (ECB) could soon pull the plug on Cypriot banks after the island’s parliament bailout rebuffal.

Not a single politician voted for the proposed levy that would have taken up to 10 percent from larger accounts, many of which are held by foreigners, while sparing smaller savers with fewer than 20,000 euros in the bank.

It was the first time a national legislature had rejected the conditions for EU assistance, after three years in which politicians in Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain and Italy all accepted biting austerity measures to secure aid.

The ECB is keeping the Cypriot banking sector going by allowing the local central bank to extend emergency support.

It said it would end that if there was no bailout deal and it was clear the banks had no hope of becoming solvent again.

For now, the ECB says it will continue allowing banks access to credit. But analysts note that if there is no bailout deal within days, the ECB will have to end it.

*Published under an agreement with Al Jazeera.