If that’s not daylight robbery, I don’t know what is?

A week ago, when the Cyprus savers crisis first hit the airwaves, my initial reaction HERE was a combination of – let’s wait and see what the real deal is – and since it’s an internal affair maybe we should take our lead form the Cypriots themselves. My feeling was we must allow them the space to do what they need to do internally and support them rather than tell them what we think they should do.

Back then savers with €100,000 were expected to pay a one off 9.9% levy of their savings and those with saving under €100,000 were charged less. By any standard it was a lot to give up from anyone’s live savings. Especially when you consider some of these savers are retirees who worked and saved all their lives for their retirement. By any standards it was simply unfair, yet it was still their business and theirs alone to decide.

But things did not stop there. Over the weekend more changes took place, beside savers being unable to get to their money for a week, they now learnt their savings are split into two different banks. In order to secure the €10bn bailout funds, the 17 eurozone finance ministers agreed to shut Popular Bank of Cyprus and all deposits below €100,000 shifted to Bank of Cyprus and a new bank created to house the rest. In addition to this, all deposits above €100,000 in both banks will be frozen. This illegal raid is expected to net up to €4.2bn.

Sadly for Cypriots and other savers in Cyprus, it seems it is investors not the government who bear the brunt of a bad currency, in a bad economy, managed by very bad decision makers – AKA the €urozone!