The proprietors of the fur and designer jewellery stores lining Limassol seafront are too discreet to discuss their wealthy customers. But their signs, in Cyrillic script, speak for themselves.
Limassol, on Cyprus’s southern coast, has become Little Moscow. Three quarters of the 40,000 citizens of Russia and the former Soviet Empire who reside permanently in Cyprus live there. Some 800,000 more come for holidays each summer, swamping the Britons, who once made up the bulk of the island’s tourists. The few remaining Irish bars on Limassol’s strip are wedged between Russian tour operators, estate agents and eateries.
Hundreds of Western-trained Cypriot lawyers and accountants earn a living by handling the affairs of Russian and Ukrainian offshore companies. The relationship has flourished since the island became a base for proto-capitalists from the former Soviet Union in the 1990s, thanks to a communist-era treaty on removing double taxation. A relaxed attitude to transactions involving cash-filled suitcases also helped.
Although Russians are popular with Greek Cypriots as fellow members of the Eastern Orthodox church, a new political party launched last September by two Russians holding Cypriot passports is raising eyebrows. Some 25,000 ex-Soviet citizens were eligible to vote in a presidential election last February. The two founders (and main backers) of Ego o Politis (I the Citizen), a restauranteur and investor (who, somewhat inconveniently, cannot speak either Greek or English), and the co-founder of an online war-gaming company, dismiss suggestions that it will promote Russian interests. EoP’s priorities are to fight graft and shrink the island’s bloated bureaucracy, says Yiorgos Kountouris, a St Petersburg-trained orchestral conductor who is the party’s vice-president. “Corruption is out of control, and education and culture here are at a very low level,” he adds. “Our potential voters are Cypriots from anywhere who are dissatisfied with the old politicians.”
