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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.
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 next year’s elections. Papadopoulos made the promise
More for SIF:
Pension
promises:
during public servants union PASYDY’s annual conference where he also accused the managers of public departments of evaluating their staff with higher grades than they deserve in order to make themselves look good.
the
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.
A fairly warm start to the year was not enough to prevent the number of tourist arrivals falling for the seventh month in a row in February, primarily owing to a collapse in the UK market. Tourist arrivals in February fell by 4.6% compared with the same month of 2006 to 63,098, bringing the cumulative decline for the year to 5.0%.
Tourism decline: