Cyprus Mail www.cyprus-mail.com
Thursday, April 25, 2013
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‘Interim IPT bill to satisfy troika’ ‘Unfair’ law to be amended in June by government rushing to meet lenders’ deadline By George Psyllides
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EARS of omissions and delays have forced the government to submit provisional immovable property tax legislation (IPT) in a bid to meet immediate bailout conditions, but which will have to be amended by the end of June to make it fairer, spokesman Christos Stylianides said yesterday. The spokesman said authorities lacked sufficient data to prepare a comprehensive proposal but at the same time the bill had to be approved in the next few days for Cyprus to be eligible for the muchneeded first tranche of a €10 billion bailout at the beginning of May. “Unfortunately, past omissions and shortcomings have resulted in insufficient data,” Stylianides said, adding that the government could not accept the current distortions in the system. Cyprus has until now taxed properties according to their 1980s values while many properties have not even been registered. “There are whole areas in Limassol, Nicosia, and Larnaca, where houses worth millions of euros are built, which do not have a building permit at the moment and are considered plots and fields,” Stylianides said. This means any law
passed under current circumstance would be unfairly distributed among registered home owners. The administration was asking for more time, pledging to have a fairer final proposal before parliament by the end of June. “We must send a bill to parliament … because we all know that we need the disbursement of the first tranche. “We expect the approval of this proposal being fully aware there will be a much better and much fairer IPT by June,” Stylianides said. The finalised IPT was expected to be paid by property owners towards the end of September. Stylianides said the state would use information and data held by local authorities, the land registry and even the VAT service. The finance and interior ministries judged that they could not collect all the data in such a short time, he said. “We are asking for this small extension because we saw that the data is distorted and insufficient,” Stylianides said. The bill aims to raise €75 million on top of the €30 million collected from the IPT in 2012. Stylianides said the final bill provided for €125 million in revenues from IPT – €75 million plus €30 million plus a ‘cushion’ included because “not everyone will
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MAN BURNS TO DEATH IN TRUCK FIRE
A 66-year-old man burnt to death yesterday while his son, 44, was in critical condition after the truck they were in was engulfed in flames on a rural road in Nicosia (Christos Theodorides) SEE STORY PAGE 3
Human extinction warning from Oxford University WHAT are the greatest global threats to humanity? Are we on the verge of our own unexpected extinction? An international team of scientists, mathematicians and philosophers at Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute is investigating the biggest dangers. And they argue in a research paper, Existential Risk as a Global Priority, that international policymakers must pay serious attention to the reality of speciesobliterating risks. According to the BBC, the Swedish-born director of the institute, Nick Bostrom, says the stakes couldn’t be higher. If we get it wrong, this could be humanity’s final century.
So what are the greatest dangers? First the good news. Pandemics and natural disasters might cause colossal and catastrophic loss of life, but Dr Bostrom believes humanity would be likely to survive. This is because as a species we’ve already outlasted many thousands of years of disease, famine, flood, predators, persecution, earthquakes and environmental change. So the odds remain in our favour. And in the time frame of a century, he says the risk of extinction from asteroid impacts and super-volcanic eruptions remains “extremely small”. Even the unprecedented self-inflicted
losses in the 20th Century in two world wars, and the Spanish flu epidemic, failed to halt the upward rise in the global human population. Nuclear war might cause appalling destruction, but enough individuals could survive to allow the species to continue. If that’s the feelgood reassurance out of the way, what should we really be worrying about? Dr Bostrom believes we’ve entered a new kind of technological era with the capacity to threaten our future as never before. These are “threats we have no track record of surviving”.
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