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President: Interest rate cuts necessary

07/07/2015 14:08
Interest rates in Cyprus must be reduced further to converge with the European standards, President Nicos Anastasiades said on Tuesday.

He noted that despite recent reductions, the average interest rate in Cyprus remains well above the European average.

"The convergence of the country`s interest rates with European standards should be a goal that we must achieve as quickly as possible if we want to talk about an economy that is competing equally in the European environment," Anastasiades told the 1st international conference held by the Coops in Limassol, under the title “Coops for you, bringing people together”.

In his speech, read out by Energy, Commerce, Industry and Tourism Minister, Yiorgos Lakkotrypis, the President of Cyprus said that the biggest problem the Cooperative sector and the whole banking system are faced with is the non performing loans.

This is were we need to see the “human face” of the Coops he noted, adding that the state “has equipped the economic partners with the appropriate institutional framework”, that is the foreclosures and the insolvency laws.

The President said that with the decrees on the recapitalisation of the Cooperative sector, the Government has ensured that until 2018 no one else will invest or become a shareholder in the Coops and until then the current administration must increase the value of the organisation and implement stricter supervision.