Cyprus Mail www.cyprus-mail.com
Saturday, December 29, 2012
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Church and state urge people to be optimistic
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Tourism recovery on a steady path Revenue and arrivals due to clock increases for 2012, says CTO chief By Poly Pantelides
M
AINLY due to increased Russian arrivals, revenue from tourism, which has been rising all year, is expected to bring close to €2 billion for 2012, a 10 per cent rise on last year, the Cyprus Tourism Organistion (CTO) said yesterday. Tourism brought in some €1.7 billion in 2011. CTO chief Alecos Orountiotis said this year would end with a 3.5 per cent increase in arrivals over last year – around 2.5 million visitors in 2012. In addition, 2011 itself was 10 per cent up on 2010. Prior to that tourism had been falling steadily and in 2009 had seen a 10 per cent drop over 2008. Up until November this year, over 470,000 Russian tourists visited the island, far exceeding the CTO’s hopes of attracting some 400,000. Orountiotis said he expected both arrivals and revenue from Russian tourists to continue rising in 2013. “We are very happy because we knew it would be a hard year,” Orountiotis said referring to an ongoing debt crisis that has limited arrivals from traditionally strong markets in Germany and the UK. Orountiotis said the
CTO was hoping it could maintain tourism from Germany and Britain at 2012 levels. However, although the UK market brings in double the number of people compared to Russia, with over 942,000 Britons visiting up until November this year, the British market used to bring in 1.5 million tourists annually only ten years ago. As the British market continues to decline, statistical services figures show that visits from Russians have continued to grow steadily. Each month last year there was a year-on-year increase ranging from a 74 per cent hike in April to 5.5 per cent in November, the only month where a percentage increase was not in double figures. On average, there was a 46.7 per cent increase in visits from the Russian Federation in the year 2011. During peak season – June, July and August this year some 250,000 Russians spent their holidays on the island. Spending €94 per head each day in 2011, Russians were the third highest spenders after the Swiss and the Israelis but stayed the longest on the island.
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A man is seen wrapped with pythons, including the Albino Burmese Python, as part of a show celebrating the coming Year of the Snake in the Chinese calendar in Malabon city, north of Manila yesterday (EPA)
Berlusconi divorce will cost him 100,000 euros a day FORMER Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has agreed to pay his estranged wife Veronica Lario 100,000 euros a day as part of a divorce settlement, the daily Corriere della Sera said yesterday. The newspaper said the 36 millioneuro-a-year settlement, reached after three years of negotiations, was filed with a court in Milan around Christmas. No comment was immediately available from the court or from lawyers for either Berlusconi or Lario following emailed and telephoned requests for confirmation.
The report comes shortly after Berlusconi’s return to frontline politics to lead the centre-right campaign ahead of an election in February. Lario, a former actress who was married to Berlusconi for more than 22 years, asked for a divorce from the 76-year-old billionaire in 2009, accusing him of having an affair with a 17-year-old girl. She had already delivered a public rebuke to her husband over his relations with other women, sending an open letter to the daily La Repubblica in 2007 in which she said he owed her a public apology after injuring her
dignity as a woman. She sought a divorce two years later, saying she could “no longer stay with a man who frequents minors” after reports emerged that Berlusconi had attended the 18th birthday party of aspiring model Noemi Letizia. Since then he has been accompanied by repeated allegations of sexual scandal, culminating in accounts last year of “bunga bunga” sex parties in his Milan home and charges of paying for sex with a juvenile prostitute,
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