Criminal Act: The European Union’s Financial Looting of Cyprus!

• Criminal Act: The European Union’s Financial Looting of Cyprus! 
  by Julie Hyland, http://www.globalresearch.ca/ 
  The bailout imposed on Cyprus by the European Union (EU) is a politically criminal act of financial looting, aimed at destroying the country’s banks and reducing the working class to penury.
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  In the name of avoiding state bankruptcy, the small Mediterranean island of some one million people is being subjected to the type of shock-therapy already inflicted on Greece.
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  The terms of the €10 billion loan dictated by the EU, European Central Bank (ECB) and the International Monetary Fund include winding up Laiki bank—Cyprus’ second-largest bank—and transferring its debts to the ECB to the Bank of Cyprus, which also faces major restructuring. An additional €5.8 billion is to be raised by imposing severe penalties, of 40 percent and more, on bondholders and those with bank deposits over €100,000.
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  Emergency capital controls are in place, including a ban on overseas transfers, a €300 limit on cash withdrawals, and a bar on anyone leaving the country with more than €1,000 in banknotes. The British security firm G4S is on guard at the island’s banks to “ensure calm” after they finally reopened yesterday after 12 days.
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  The measures are in line with German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s insistence that Cyprus must recognise “its current business model is dead.” With the country’s financial sector eight times the size of its GDP, this means economic collapse.
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  This is not mitigated one iota by the fact that the Cypriot government was forced to retreat on its plan to impose a 6.7 percent levy on bank deposits below €100,000. Those supposedly saved in this instance are to be bled dry by other means.
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  Unemployment stands at 15 percent due to the EU austerity measures implemented by the previous Communist Party-led government, which—even before the current crisis—had led to the opening of charitable food banks in Paphos, Limassol and Nicosia.
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  This will worsen dramatically. As the Wall Street Journal noted with satisfaction, “Nicosia will now face the usual conditions of a euro-zone rescue: labor-market reforms, fiscal discipline, privatizations, pension and health-care reform.”
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  Unlike EU bailouts for Greece, Ireland, Spain and others, however, where the pretence was maintained that austerity and wage cuts would revive the economy, the press openly admits that the EU’s medicine in Cyprus will kill the patient.
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  The loan is tied in with mass job losses and wages cuts, the gutting of health, education and social provision, the privatisation of major utilities, and the handing over of the island’s natural and energy resources to the global energy giants.
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  GDP is forecast to fall by 25 percent in the next two to three years, and unemployment to double. With the entire euro zone sinking into a recession that will be exacerbated by the measures in Cyprus, the result will be social and economic devastation.
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  The Financial Times blamed the Cypriot population, writing, “… the choice to hitch the economy to offshore banking was made with the complicity of leaders and the acquiescence of a population content to live beyond its means.”
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