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Wednesday, April 17, 2013
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Auditor-general says ‘told you so’ Deputies told that troika would not have been needed if her recommendations had been followed By Poly Pantelides
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UDITOR-GENERAL Chrystalla Georghadji yesterday slammed the years of complacency in Cyprus which have led to millions slipping through the fingers of the state, much of which is now unrecoverable. During a briefing at the House Watchdog Committee, Georghadji said the state is owed €1.6 billion in tax and other revenues, which have gone uncollected despite repeated warnings from her office over the years on the amount of money wasted across the wider public service. While unpaid taxes now stood at €1 billion, she said, around €380 million owed to the state would now be written off in bad debts. “That amount is likely to increase given the ongoing crisis,” Georghadji said, urging the state to at least make an effort to collect the unpaid taxes. “It is imperative that those whose deposits are inconsistent with their tax statements are investigated,” she said. Georghadji said the current situation clearly demonstrated the “huge importance of timely receipt of every due payment” to the state, suggesting that if this had been done, there may not have been a need for an EU bailout for the island. Over the
years, Georghadji’s office has issued lengthy reports documenting both waste across the government and semi-government sectors, recommending action be taken. But successive governments failed to act ignoring damning report after damning report, and ultimately passing on the problems to their successors. She said that a Greekspeaking member of the troika of international lenders who read her report on the state’s fiscal needs had expressed the opinion that if the Auditor-general’s suggestions had been followed over the years, “Cyprus would not need the troika”. The report was not translated into English because the cost was not covered under her office’s budget, she said. Georghadji was clear that the need to pass measures now in order to get the €10 billion bailout Cyprus needed from its lenders was far worse than what it would have cost successive governments if they had been proactive and followed her recommendations. For example, rather than working on immovable property tax in a rationalised and forward planning way “so that the adjustment was smoother, we are instead now obliged to act under the pressure of the memorandum (of un-
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Two rebel soldiers standing guard in the Karmel Jabl neighborhood of Aleppo, Syria, 18 October 2012, as over a dozen holes made by bullets and shrapnel pepper the tin wall behind them. The picture, released yesterday, by AFP photographer Javier Manzano, won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography (EPA)
Captain Underpants beats Fifty Shades in library moans SUBVERSIVE toilet humour proved more offensive to Americans than bondage and eroticism last year, according to a list of most challenged books in US libraries that saw complaints about Captain Underpants outweigh those for Fifty Shades of Grey. The American Library Association (ALA) said Dav Pilkey’s Captain Underpants series for children, that features characters like Professor Poopypants and Wedgie Woman, came top of its 2012 list of books that Americans asked to be removed from libraries because of content they considered inappropriate. The Captain Underpants series of 10 books has appeared on the annual list three times since 2002, but has never previously reached the No.1 spot, the
ALA said. Fifty Shades of Grey, the best-selling sadomasochistic tale of college students and a businessmen by British author EL James, debuted on the list in fourth place after the erotic trilogy sold 70 million copies around the world in the past two years. The ALA said that its office for intellectual freedom received a total of 464 reports in 2012 on attempts to remove books from public and school libraries or school curricula. That was an increase from the 326 such attempts recorded in 2011. The ALA defines such “challenges” as formal written complaints to a library or school requesting that a book or other material be restricted or removed.
Other books making the list included And Tango Makes Three, a children’s tale about two male penguins who adopt an egg together, and Khaled Hosseini’s Afghanistan-based best-seller The Kite Runner. The ALA’s top 10 list of the mostchallenged books of 2012 are Captain Underpants (series) by Dav Pilkey, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie, Thirteen Reasons Why, by Jay Asher, Fifty Shades of Grey by EL James, And Tango Makes Three by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson, The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, Looking for Alaska by John Green, Scary Stories (series) by Alvin Schwartz, The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls and Beloved by Toni Morrison.