Only last May, after a meeting at the Presidential Palace chaired by President Christodoulides, it was announced that the Cyprus Ports Authority would take over the port, the marina and the land-side development in Larnaca.
The announcement came from then Transport Minister Alexis Vafeades, the man who would step up to take the bullet. The government, he said, was moving immediately to hand the entire upgrade project over to the Cyprus Ports Authority: port, marina and land-side area.
The mayor, the president of the Larnaca District Local Government Organisation and the president of the Larnaca Chamber of Commerce and Industry were more than satisfied. “Decisions have been taken, and at long last a project the town has been waiting on for decades and decades is on its way to becoming reality. It’s a day of joy for us. We are waiting to see our project delivered,” said the chamber’s president.
After the ordeal they had been through with the private company that took the project on and then left in disgrace, after the town’s protests and promises that came to nothing, they had every reason to believe that “decisions have been taken” at last. Until yesterday, that is. Because yesterday another problem cropped up, one that the Presidential Palace and the ministry should have known about when they were taking those decisions.
Yesterday, then, an opinion from the Law Office of the Republic turned up at the House Transport Committee. It said that the marina and its land-side area are state property and that developing them requires a public tender. (The land matters, by the way: that is where the grand buildings will go up, the ones that will earn the contractor a fat profit.) So if the Ports Authority wants to take on the development, it has to enter the tender when it is announced and put in a bid. It cannot take over the project by direct transfer.
In other words, the state, which owns the land, cannot find a way to transfer it to the Ports Authority, which the state also owns. Nor can the state’s own Law Office find a way. It hands down an edict to the letter of the law and leaves everyone else running in circles. But we are talking about political decisions here. Whether a project this important is taken on by the state, by one of the state’s own authorities, or handed to a private investor from China, Qatar or Norway is a political decision. The Law Office cannot make that decision. The President of the Republic and his Council of Ministers have a duty to make it, just as they made the decision to terminate the project contract with Kition.
Granted, there would be a legal problem if the state decided to hand the project directly to a private company without any bids. But that it cannot find a way to give the project to one of its own authorities, a state body at that, strikes us as bizarre and baffling.
Unless, of course, they were looking for a way to bring private investors into the project, rather than a way to hand it lawfully and methodically to the Ports Authority. Because, let’s be blunt, the whole project, as Kition Ocean Holdings had taken it on until it was thrown out in May 2024, was worth 1.2 billion euros. We’re talking serious money!
On April Fool’s Day 2022, the Cypriot state handed a private company, Kition, the keys to the port and marina of Larnaca (which are also points of entry into the country, so this is no joke) to make the biggest investment ever! We all know what happened next. Now they tell us they cannot hand the keys to the most obvious state body for the job, the Ports Authority, because they are letting legal hair-splitting paralyse necessary and urgent political decisions. Well, no serious state behaves like this.
