Help me, Mr President — I’m so bored and overpaid

A CIVIL servant in bailed-out Cyprus has done the unthinkable: he has written to the president to complain about being handsomely paid to do nothing for the past year.

Marios Droushiotis revealed he had yet to do a single day’s work since he was made “point of single contact” at the energy, commerce and tourism ministry in February last year. Not a single file had crossed his desk, and he had not been assigned any work.

“I find it unacceptable that an employee on a pay scale of A13+2 is obliged into inertia,” the civil servant wrote in a letter to the Greek Cypriot leader, Nicos Anastasiades.

“In my opinion the state would have made savings if I was told to stay at home and my salary was sent to me. The state would also save the costs of heating and lighting my office.”

Civil servants on his pay scale earn around à5 000 (about R86 000) a month, compared with average gross monthly earnings in the small EU member state of just more than à1 500 in the third quarter of 2015.

With the economy now back on track and Anastasiades championing a reform agenda to make the Mediterranean holiday island’s bloated and unwieldy public sector more efficient, the government is expected to exit the bailout programme within weeks.

The commerce ministry has defended its corner, accusing Droushiotis of “unjustly slandering public officials”.

His new post was key to attracting foreign investors and cutting red tape, it said in a statement.

The argument that “moving Mr Droushiotis to this post is a waste of money just does not stand up”.

The public widely regards civil servants in Cyprus, which has endured three years of austerity and high unemployment since the March 2013 international bailout, as overprivileged, overpaid and work-shy.