CYPRUS: EU Move to Rob Depositors Directly of Savings Set for Tuesday Vote
While this isn’t directly related to Orthodoxy, there’s enough there in Cyprus being ground zero for the EU takeover of personal accounts that it is newsworthy. What a way to start Great Lent.
A vote in Cyprus on whether to approve a controversial bailout plan has been postponed after the prospect of the deal caused bank customers to rush to withdraw their savings and drew the ire of overseas depositors.
As NPR’s Krishnadev Calamur wrote in a post over the weekend: “The money [is] needed because Cyprus’ banks lost 4.5 billion euros on their Greek bond holdings, which were written down last year after Greece’s second bailout.”
The bailout, which is now set for a vote Tuesday, is just $13 billion, a tiny sum compared to the $150 billion given to Greece. But it’s the first time the eurozone and the IMF have taken a cut of people’s savings — a one-time levy of 6.75 percent on deposits under 100,000 euros and 9.9 percent on higher amounts — to finance the plan.