Cypriots’ president defends bailout package

NICOSIA, Cyprus — Cyprus’ president said Saturday that the decision to force bank depositors to share the burden of a $13 billion bailout package from its European partners and the International Monetary Fund was made to save his country from financial ruin.

Despite that assurance, nervous depositors rushed to ATM machines Saturday to drain their accounts.

President Nicos Anastasiades said Cyprus had little option but to accept the bailout deal, which imposes a levy on the country’s bank deposits — an unprecedented step in the eurozone crisis. Without it, he said, Cyprus’ banking system would have collapsed on Tuesdsay, when the European Central Bank would have stopped providing emergency funding to Cyprus’ troubled banks. Such a collapse would have driven the country to bankruptcy and possibly out of the eurozone, he said.

The president said the deposit levy rescues banks, keeps the country’s debt load manageable, and avoids the risk of deeper pay cuts and tax hikes.

“We’re not aiming to gloss over the situation,” he said after the EU-IMF meeting in Brussels agreed on the bailout early Saturday.

News of the levy stunned the public because Anastasiades and his top ministers had vehemently rejected any suggestions of going after deposits to save Cyprus’ banks, which lost billions on bad Greek debt.