At the very same time that the Attorney General’s office was scrambling to build a case against the so-called Al Jazeera scandal, it was also scrambling to build a case against Odysseas Michaelides. The contrast between how those two efforts unfolded tells you everything you need to know.
In the first case — against Syllouri and Giovanni — the prosecution simply didn’t secure the evidence and witness testimony needed to win. They granted immunity to witnesses who, as Elias Stefanou noted, “were themselves suspects in criminal offences, so that they could be used as prosecution witnesses” — and then those witnesses vanished. A case was filed, then withdrawn. Another was filed in the District Court, migrated to the Assize Court, the indictment was amended, one defendant was dropped, and the accused were never even questioned about the financial aspects of their agreement with NG. The Assize Court itself said so. It’s the portrait of a case that was lost before it began.
The failures were numerous and damning. The prosecution failed to call material witnesses — including Ministry of Finance officials who had been directly involved in verifying the financial criteria and sat within the decision-making chain for the contested naturalisations. The Assize Court was pointed in its criticism, noting that whenever the prosecution omits material witnesses from its list and declines to call them to the stand, it must always provide an explanation.
No explanation was forthcoming. Not in court, and certainly not at the Attorney General’s office’s combative press conference, where everyone else was blamed and not a single word of self-criticism was offered.
The second case — against Odysseas Michaelides — was a different operation entirely. The Attorney General’s office worked with conspicuous zeal. Prosecutors presented the Supreme Constitutional Court with a mountain of material: 203 exhibits comprising letters, statements made on radio and television programmes, and social media posts, as recorded in the September 2024 ruling. The alleged misconduct was laid out across 208 paragraphs spanning 15 separate sections. Attorney General Giorgos Savvides presented the case himself, submitting a written statement to the court that ran to 111 pages. A book, essentially.
So here is the question that demands an honest answer: how much time, brainpower, and institutional energy did the Attorney General’s office pour into assembling material to prosecute Odysseas Michaelides for “improper conduct” — and how much into securing the prosecution witnesses without whom a conviction in the Syllouri-Giovanni case was, by their own admission, virtually impossible? Especially when they knew — they had to know — that the video was unlikely to be admitted as evidence either.
The public, journalists, and politicians have watched both cases closely, and above all, they have watched how the Attorney General’s office handled them. The comparison is unavoidable. The criticism now being levelled is not born of malice — it is the product of accumulated frustration at a series of decisions that have corroded confidence in the institutions that are supposed to uphold the rule of law, and most acutely in the Attorney General’s office, which has cast itself as Cyprus’s chief weapon against corruption.
Trust is an institutional responsibility. It cannot be demanded. It cannot be performed at a press conference. It has to be earned — through results, through rigour, through accountability. Not through grievances and assurances about the personal integrity of individual prosecutors.
P.S. After the President of the Republic, the two highest-paid officials in the Cypriot state are the Attorney General and the Deputy Attorney General, each drawing a monthly salary of €13,531 in gross terms and €9,207 net. That figure matters. At that level of remuneration, mistakes are not a footnote — they require explanation. Weaknesses require acknowledgement. What is emphatically not appropriate is going on the offensive, invoking Thermopylae, and warning — as Polina Efthyvoulou did — that “God help us if the political parties, if the media, if society doesn’t support us.” On €13,531 a month, the institutional support is already built in and more than generous. The trust, however, is another matter entirely. Nobody is going to hand it to them. They will have to go out and earn it.
