The BoD of the Cyprus Tourism Organization and the staff of the organization informed, last week, the Minister in charge of tourism George Lakkotrypis and the Deputy Minister under the President Konstantinos Petridis regarding the plans for the transformation of the CTO into a Ministry of Tourism.
Last Wednesday, the BoD was informed. and the next day the staff was briefed, in a process that included questions from officials to state officials. According to information, after the official briefing on the objectives of the CTO reform, an official asked the Deputy Minister Mr. Petridis "when will the draft bill be ready", in order to receive the answer that such questions are not timely and that In any case, it is not pessimistic to expect the submission of a bill after the parliamentary elections. In his statements, Deputy Minister Petridis confirmed the meetings with the staff, describing the meeting as "very good". A similar meeting was held with the BoD. of the CTO "which also agreed that the CTO should be abolished and operate perhaps in 2017 if it passes the Parliament as Deputy Minister of Tourism".
Employees are positive
However, the CTO staff did not show any negative attitudes towards the government's plans. In fact, many CTO officials expressed themselves positively last Thursday with the prospect of becoming government officials. The positive attitude of the officials towards the perspective of the ministry is undermined, however, by the inability of the government to answer the question whether the transfers will be in organic positions, with such a verbal appointment to exclude the possibility of future secondment of other ministries (perspective not welcomed by the agency's staff). Asked by an official about the possibility of submitting a privileged plan for early retirement of a large number of staff along with the bill for the transformation of the CTO into a state ministry, Mr. Petridis allegedly did not rule out such a possibility, but at the same time threw the ball to the unions. giving them the obligation to present a similar proposal themselves.
A little about the studies
As it turns out, in informing the staff and the board. of the CTO by the Minister of Tourism and the Deputy Minister in spite of the President, the impression formed on the staff is that the CTO will simply change form and from a semi-governmental organization will become a state ministry. That is, instead of the responsibility of managing the organization being taken over by a multi-member board, it will be taken over by the Deputy Minister of Tourism, who is therefore expected to be a politically displaced person. In the updates of the board. and staff held last week, Mr Lakkotrypis and Mr Petridis avoided presenting in detail the studies before them, which included proposals to transfer some of the CTO's responsibilities to local authorities, such as hotels. As the transfer of these responsibilities was linked to the reform of the local government (which was postponed), the discussion of the proposal for deforestation of the CTO from its responsibilities is referred to a later time. However, if the CTO changes its clothes to dress as a deputy minister, then the major issue with the mismanagement within the organization and the cases of corruption that concern the current board, will not be dealt with drastically, but will be referred as problems to resolution to the future Undersecretary.
Source: "POLITIS" newspaper