21 April 2015

The Administrator of the Cyprus Branch of FBME, Dinos Christofides, left the Cyprus branch of FBME Bank at 2pm yesterday, Monday 20 April, saying he will not return until Monday next week, 27 April. In time-honoured fashion, he managed not to warn anyone before he walked out, leaving the Bank’s efforts to meet payments to its depositors to grind, once more, to an undignified halt!

As we reported recently, the absurd and harmful restriction on payouts to just EUR 200 a day has harmed companies and stopped some employees from being able to collect their full salary each month, in contravention of the law. For the rest of this week they will be even further behind.

Not that any of this affects the Administrator who pays himself his EUR 10,000 out of FBME funds each month come rain or come sunshine. For his sake, let’s hope he has his tax umbrella fully in place.

For the record, the Central Bank of Cyprus currently holds nearly EUR 150 million of deposits from FBME.