The community council of Palaichori Oreinis called for an administrative inquiry into moves to remove its community leader, Tasos Michaelides, saying the process began the day after it decided to complain to the Cabinet about the Interior Ministry’s decision to move the seat of the area’s community services cluster out of the village.
According to the council, it decided unanimously on September 29 to complain to the Cabinet about the ministry’s director general, Elikkos Elia, over the transfer of the seat of the Madari-Papoutsa Community Services Cluster from Palaichori to Alona. The process for Michaelides’s automatic removal from office began on September 30. The council asked the President to intervene and said the timing raised questions, calling for an investigation into whether the two were connected.
It described the attempt to remove Michaelides, whom it said residents have elected for 32 consecutive years, as an unprecedented breach of institutional order and part of a campaign by certain ministry officials against the community.
The removal process is linked to Michaelides’s conviction for malicious damage in 2021. The council said the ministry had known about the “forgotten” ruling since it was issued, and also when Michaelides was re-elected in the 2024 local government elections, but had not considered it an obstacle on either occasion. It argued that the ruling had nothing to do with the legal grounds for removing elected officials.
Ministry’s response
Antonis Oikonomides, the ministry’s director of local government, said the case, over an incident in 2015, also involved assault, unlawful entry and actual bodily harm.
He put the delay in starting the removal process down to a “mix-up” and the possible referral of the relevant letter. On Michaelides being re-elected despite the conviction, he had previously said that there was no opinion from the Law Office of the Republic at the time.
Seat dispute
The council also disputed the legality and purpose of moving the cluster’s seat to Alona, which it said has 29 residents. Palaichori, it said, has 1,400 permanent residents out of the cluster’s 1,600, and that should have been taken into account. It called on Elia and Oikonomides to explain publicly which objective criteria and which provision of the law the decision was based on.
The council further accused the ministry of leaking a letter marked ‘Restricted Access’ to the newspaper Politis, and accused Oikonomides of damaging Michaelides’s name and reputation with slanderous insinuations in remarks on Omega.
