In the Telegraph, Colin Freeman looks at how the banking crisis is impacting ordinary Cypriots and retired EU citizens in Cyprus:
Last weekend, the small Mediterranean island was plunged into the epicentre of the eurozone crisis when Brussels finance chiefs, led by Germany, demanded a levy of up to ten per cent of savers’ deposits in return for a 10bn euro bail-out of the country’s ailing banks. The move left many of Cyprus’s 60,000-strong British community facing heavy losses on retirement nest eggs — and as the week rolled on, that looked like being just the least of their worries.
On Thursday, unhappy at the Cypriot parliament’s rejection of the deal, Europe’s Central Bank then threatened to cut financial life support for the island altogether, a move that would have led to its banking sector collapsing, and savers losing not just a percentage of their money, but all of it. It was only thanks to a last-minute agreement hammered out on Friday night, which is expected to restructure the country’s banks and restrict the levy to deposits of more than 100,000 euros, that all-out chaos was averted. For now, anyway.
[. . .]
Since last weekend, when all of Cyprus’s banks were shut to stop a run on withdrawals, work has ground to a halt, as the repair man has been unable to buy in the materials he needs from suppliers, who are all now demanding cash. The job symbolises the malaise of the wider Cypriot economy, built on shaky foundations, and now in a state of paralysis, with thousands of shops, businesses and restaurants unable to operate properly because of the financial uncertainty.
“None of my food and drink suppliers are taking bank payments any more,” said Yiota Vrasida, 43, who owns a café in the winding streets of the capital, Nicosia. “We can keep going until this weekend, but that is about it.”
[. . .]
“Nobody will want to leave so much as 10 euros in any Cypriot bank any more,” said Dino Karambalis, 49, an IT worker, standing at the end of a 30-people-long queue at the Laiki Bank, where he had 90,000 euros in savings. “They say this levy is only for Cyprus, but why should anyone believe that? This is undermining confidence in the euro as a whole, and in the whole EU project itself. I was pro-European before, but not now.”
This weekend, the Cypriot parliament sought to reassure smaller savers, saying those with less than 100,000 euros would face at most a levy of less than one percent. State television also talked of a one-time charge of up to 25 percent on savings of over 100,000 euros held at the Bank of Cyprus. With that in mind, capital controls will be imposed to stop a run on the banks when they reopen next week.
But whatever new measures come in, some damage has already been done by declaring savers’ accounts to be fair game in the first place. Britain’s Business Secretary, Vince Cable, warned on Friday that it could lead Northern Rock-style runs on banks all over the eurozone in future.
