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campaign raised record awareness for the online payment to the Dept. of Motor Vehicles by entering each renewal into a draw for a BMW X5 all-purpose vehicle. The bank scooped its peers by collecting some CYP 12 mln (EUR 20.6 mln) of the CYP 18 mln (EUR 31 mln) fees for road taxes. A further 50,000 renewals were done online through the JCCsmart portal.

Employers will soon be called to pay more to the near-bankrupt Social Insurance Fund in order to ensure that future generations will have a pension to receive at retirement age. But a 2.55% contribution on wages to the troubled National Health Service (NHS) may be avoided for now as despite all the good intentions of the Minister of Health, this plan will be delayed further, beyond the mid-2008 target set by Charis Charalambous. Social insurance contributions are expected to rise by 1% a year over the next five years, with employers, employees and the state sharing the cost equally.

President Tassos Papadopoulos has promised a hike in pensions by the end of the year, but other issues such as 14th salaries as well as the one-time payment of CYP 20,000 (EUR 34,400) for a third child will have to wait until after

More for SIF:

Pension

promises:

next year’s elections. Papadopoulos made the promise during the public servants union PASYDY’s annual conference where he also accused managers of public departments of evaluating their staff with much higher grades than they deserve in order to make themselves look good.

Eurocypria contract:

An outsourcing catering and airport handling contract to supply Eurocypria has been won by a Louis company, leading to strike action by Cyprus Airways employees at Paphos airport, worried about their jobs.

Parliament passed a bill approving entry into the Eurozone on January 1, 2008, with the press criticising the communist party AKEL for objecting to the whole process that brought it into conflict with the ruling coalition government of which it is the biggest member.

Eurozone vote: