“Show me the money!”

When “Jerry Maguire” star player Cuba Gooding Jr. had doubts whether his on-screen manager Tom Cruise had closed a career-breaking sponsorship deal, he blurted the now-cliché “show me the money!” Since then, it is used by doubting Thomases to imply reserved trust in the financial transactions of a manager.

So, too, in Cyprus, we should be cautiously optimistic when the government declares that revenues from the somewhat controversial investment-for-passports scheme have reached a total EUR 6.6 bln since it was first introduced as a “short term” post-crisis rescue package.

This is double the amount announced by then-minister Socratis Hasikos, who said in December 2016 that the scheme had raised EUR 3.3 bln and a further 700 mln from the residency programme in exchange for buying a EUR 300,000 apartment. Simply put, the purpose at the time was not to support the local economy, as much as to ensure that civil servants continue to get paid their fat wages at the end of the month, come rain or shine, regardless of workers in the private sector having seen their salaries slashed and many pushed to unemployment, unable to return to the active labour market.

Although the government may have gone to some lengths to defend the scheme, all it has done is to pander to the wants of those driving the island’s services sector, lining the pockets of property developers in the shortterm, not considering what will happen when the towerbuilding craze comes to an end, once again returning to high unemployment in the construction sector (signals of which we are seeing nowadays).

Just like the ill-conceived Energy Wealth Fund, which has been left to the mercy of politicians to decide the fate and structure of revenues from the oil and gas exploration licenses, the passports’ revenue stream has no transparency over where the money is ending up and how much will be injected into real development or to fund research and innovation.

As long as our EU partners’ scepticism seems to have been satisfied, for now, by way of the Cabinet announcing “stricter” criteria to acquire a Cyprus passport for cash, the smokescreen of throwing a bone to the real economy is perplexing, to say the least.

Way back in 2013, the initial plan included mandatory investments in local industry, to inject funds into the economy and ensure employment.

Somewhere along the road, “industry” became “construction”, possibly because of the noise made at the time by trade unions representing masses of workers, as well as development and property companies that considered themselves “too big to fail”. Of course, as long as civil servants are happy that their wages were not cut by much (a 40-euro deduction hardly compares to dwindling salaries in the private sector), politically-driven trade unions supported the scheme, arguing that this was putting bread on the table of many households. Did it?

In a knee-jerk reaction to growing criticism that the skyrise-building frenzy has made the Limassol property market volatile, pushing low-income households out of their homes and creating the first real threat of homeless people on our streets, the government has at last balanced the cash-for-passports scheme with a compulsory “donation” of EUR 75,000 to the research and innovation authority, and a further 75,000 per passport to secure the construction of low-cost housing by way of the Housing Development Corp.

All’s well, considering that the government aims to maintain an unofficial cap of 700 passports a year, translated into about EUR 52 mln a year for R&D for which no money was foreseen anywhere and the introduction of as many homes for low-income families.

This begs the question, where will the remaining EUR 1.645 bln end up. Giving pay increases to deserving civil servants?