Cyprus confiscates bank saver funds

The President has put it off until tomorrow in order to get more support in Parliament.

And Greek depositors are exempt from the tax....
 
latest... lol "SOLIDARY LEVY"

Money will be cut from accounts by Tuesday morning
http://www.cyprus-mail.com/bailout/money-will-be-cut-accounts-tuesday-morning/20130317

By Elias Hazou Published on March 17, 2013

bailout, Cyprus, deposits


Queues formed at ATMs islandwide yesterday

THE ONE-OFF levy on bank deposits agreed between Nicosia and international creditors will impact all Cypriot account holders.
In addition to Cypriot commercial and co-operative banks, Barclays, Russian Commercial Bank and Societe Generale, among others, would be affected.
“As we understand it, anything with credit will be subject to the levy, be it a deposit or current account,” bank sources said.

The Cyprus deal means the country’s savers, almost half of whom are believed to be non-resident Russians, are asked to pay up to 10 per cent of their deposits to raise some €5.8 billion for the government.

International lenders will put up around €10 billion to help the island pay back its debt.
People with less than €100,000 in Cypriot bank accounts will have to pay a one-time tax of 6.75 per cent, while those with more will have to pay 9.9 per cent.
Euphemistically dubbed a “solidarity levy,” what it amounts to is a haircut on deposits, economic analysts said.

Savers will be ‘compensated’ in the form of bank shares of an equal value to the amount contributed, finance minister Michalis Sarris told the state broadcaster.
In addition to the levy, Sarris said, a 20 to 25 per cent tax will be imposed on the interest on deposits.

And in return for emergency loans, Cyprus additionally agreed to increase its corporate tax rate by 2.5 per cent to 12.5 per cent.

The deal was reached after late-night discussions in Brussels with the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
In return for the €10 billion bailout, Cyprus has been asked to reduce its deficit, shrink its banking sector and increase taxes.
Bank sources said a run on bank ATMs started from Friday night – while the Eurogroup was in progress –peaking yesterday morning as soon as news broke from Brussels.
“The ATMs are running out of cash,” a source said.

The frenzy of withdrawals was triggered by savers likely thinking that by reducing their bank balance they would reduce their taxable amount.
However understandable, it was probably an exercise in futility, because the taxable amount will apply retroactively, from the moment the deal was struck in Brussels.
Joerg Asmussen, a member of the executive board of the European Central Bank, said the Cypriot parliament would have to legislate on the measure over the weekend and the tax, which he said had already been frozen in deposits, would be removed before banks opened on Tuesday morning.
He said also the Cypriot Central Bank had done “contingency planning” for the event of a run on the nation's banks after the announcement of the extraordinary measures.

Asmussen said Cyprus's banks would have to continue receiving funding the Central Bank of Cyprus's Emergency Liquidity Assistance facility- an expensive lending program -but would be able to access normal ECB financing after they had been recapitalized.

The ECB official justified the measure by saying it broadened the number of people who will shoulder the burden of the bailout. Without the measures, he said, much of it would fall on Cypriot taxpayers; by going after all large deposit holders – many of whom are Russian or British – outsiders would help fund the rescue.
Greek depositors would not be hit, Asmussen said. Cypriot bank branches would be “ring fenced” and sold off to a Greek bank at a later date.
Before Tuesday – when the banks reopen after an extended weekend – the government hopes to pass three bills in total – one on the corporate tax, another on the levy on deposits and a third on the tax on interest on deposits.

A House plenum was expected to be convened today or tomorrow at the latest; House Speaker Yiannakis Omirou was forced to cut short a visit to London and return to the island last night.

The urgency of the matter mobilised the entire state machinery. Technocrats from the finance ministry, the Central Bank and officials from the Attorney-general’s office were yesterday summoned to the Finance Ministry to begin drafting the items of legislation.
The Association of Cyprus Banks also convened.

The Mail was told also that, as early as Thursday evening, Attorney-general Petros Clerides got a call from Brussels asking him to start working on the bills.
Sources close to the Bank of Cyprus said they had received verbal instructions to suspend internal internet banking.

To avert a run on the co-operative banks the Co-operative Central Bank instructed outlets to lock their systems to prevent transactions. Many branches remained closed for the day; co-operatives are normally open for business on Saturdays.
 
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Front pages of both Yahoo and Google News don't show a single news item about this. Obvious suppression/censorship.
 
Thought this was an interesting observation:

http://pjmedia.com/rogerkimball/2013/03/17/more-rot-from-the-eu-cyprus-edition/

As Business Insider reports, this so-called “stability levy” is expected to raise €5.8 billion. It is also expected to raise a “flood of concerns” — that’s bureaucratese for “panic” — about a run on banks elsewhere in the eurozone, where (as the report delicately puts it) “fragile public finances are also under scrutiny.”

Right. So that €100,000 it took you years to save is, come Monday, worth €90,000. And how about the following Tuesday, when it will turn out Cypriot banks need more dough? What then? Jörg Asmussen, a member of the Executive Board of the European Central Bank, explained it thus: “In order to have burden-sharing, you extend the tax base. To residents and also to non-residents.” Spoken like a true socialist (or Social Democrat, which is the same thing). Politicians and bankers mess up, you pay. Private property? Ha, ha, ha. [Update: my friend Janet Daley writes: "It's worth noting that this EU confiscation of private savings is using the same excuse (catching money-launderers and foreign currency smugglers) that the US uses to justify FATCA [Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act]. The civil liberties and property rights of law-abiding people can be trampled over in the name of pursuing ‘criminals.’”]
 
The big people (apparently a lot of Russian Oligarchs stash money there) they wanted to nail with this probably already have their cash wired out of Cyprus by now. It will only affect the common person who can't act as fast.

Sad for Cypriots who saved.
 
The big people (apparently a lot of Russian Oligarchs stash money there) they wanted to nail with this probably already have their cash wired out of Cyprus by now. It will only affect the common person who can't act as fast.

Sad for Cypriots who saved.

I think it is all retroactive and you cannot withdrawl the tax seed ?
 
... news from both the WSJ and the FT that the original confiscation thresholds of 6.75% and 9.9% for deposits below and over €100,000 is about to be revised.

From the FT: "a revised deal being discussed in Nicosia, with the blessing of the European Commission, would shift more of the burden on to deposits larger than €100,000, according to officials involved in the talks. Under a controversial deal struck with international bailout lenders in the early hours on Saturday, a 6.75 per cent levy would be imposed on all deposits under €100,000 while accounts over that threshold would be hit with a 9.9 per cent levy. The depositor levy was demanded by a German-led group of creditor countries to bring down the bailout’s price tag from €17bn.... Officials involved in last night’s talks said the changes in the levy’s rates were in flux, but they could see the higher rate increase to as much as 12.5 per cent while the smaller deposits could be about 3.5 per cent."

Elsewhere, according to the WSJ, the deposit "tax" would be under 5% for deposits under €100K, under 10% for deposits between €100 and €500K, and over 13% for deposits greater than half a million.

While this idiotic last minute revision will only infuriate Russian oligarchs even more, it will achieve absolutely nothing to streamline the passage of the bill through Cyprus parliament where it appears to have hung without enough support: the damage has already been done, and it is a virtual guarantee that Cyprus banks will suffer a full blown bank run the second banks reopen, which may be Tuesday, Wednesday, or never, at the current pace. ...

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-...ute-revision-cyprus-deposit-confiscation-plan

... RBS has put together an excellent summary of everything you need to know about what the Europeans did, why they did it, what the short- and medium-term market reaction is likely to be, and the big picture of this "toxic policy error." ...

More: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-03-17/cyprus-world’s-biggest-poker-game

Best I can tell, the ECB is demanding ~6B Euros or Cyprus can GTFO:
...
The euro zone has indicated that changes [to the levy tax - bern] would be acceptable as long as the return of around six billion euros is maintained. If the Cypriot parliament votes the deal down, the euro zone would face a real risk of being dragged back into crisis.

"It is up to the government alone to decide if it wants to change the structure of the ... contribution (from) the banking sector," European Central Bank policymaker Joerg Asmussen, who was pivotal in the weekend negotiations, told reporters on the sidelines of a Berlin conference.

"The important thing is that the financial contribution of 5.8 billion euros remains," he said.
...

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/03/18/us-cyprus-parliament-idUSBRE92G03I20130318

Oh.. and Putin mad?
Russian President Vladimir Putin criticized on Monday a levy imposed by the European Union on bank deposits in Cyprus as unfair and setting a dangerous precedent.

"While assessing the proposed additional levy on bank accounts in Cyprus, Putin said that such a decision, should it be made, would be unfair, unprofessional and dangerous," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told journalists.
...
Russian Deputy Finance Minister Sergei Shatalov earlier said the tax would be acceptable if it was levied only on interest earned by savers.
...

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/03/18/us-russia-cyprus-loan-idUSBRE92H07M20130318

Yeah, he mad.

RT reporting that the Cyprus vote is delayed until Tuesday:
...
A meeting of the Cyprus parliament had been originally scheduled for Sunday but was postponed until Tuesday in order to try and broker a deal between the parties, Cypriot state media reported.

At the same time authorities have extended for another day Monday’s bank holiday, so the levy is unlikely to come in force on Tuesday morning as was initially planned.
...

http://rt.com/business/cyprus-bailout-bank-tax-deposits-401/

Daniel Hannan op-ed is a good read (can't help but read it in his voice):
...
Morgan Stanley yesterday described the bailout as a ‘worrying precedent with potentially systemic consequences’. This is about as close as a bank will ever come to saying, ‘Panic! Panic!’

Eurocrats have lost all credibility on this subject. Every single bailout, including this one, was preceded by sonorous assurances that it wouldn’t happen.

The underlying financial situation, we kept being told, was strong. Only last month, the President of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso, declared that the euro crisis was over.

Yet again, the ‘experts’ have been spectacularly wrong. Not only the Eurocrats, but the central bankers, the economics graduates who write for the Financial Times and all the other clever-clogs who backed the bailout-and-borrow racket have been awry in their predictions.

Meanwhile, the eccentrics who kept their money out of banks, the handful of Austrian School economists and the bearded survivalists who kept telling us to buy gold have been proved right.
...

More: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2295007/Fanatics-wholl-save-euro.html?ito=feeds-newsxml
 
The banks in Cyprus are closed through Thursday and the Parliamentary government votes today on the confiscation amounts... with the scamming of fractional reserve banking, you know there's no way these Cyprus banks can refund all the depositors. The money pallets are coming from somewhere to replenish the fiat paper before opening on Thursday.

Yet another lead boot attached to the decline and eventual end of the Euro.

WWiTV: http://wwitv.com/television/55.htm
 
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Everyone should really take heart at this because it demonstrates that the banking cartel is really NOT very bright. Gee, did it occur to anyone that confiscating people's savings to paper over a bank crisis just MIGHT make people more skittish about leaving their money in banks? And that maybe this would make banks all over Europe more run-prone? Really, REALLY stupid.
 
Everyone should really take heart at this because it demonstrates that the banking cartel is really NOT very bright. Gee, did it occur to anyone that confiscating people's savings to paper over a bank crisis just MIGHT make people more skittish about leaving their money in banks? And that maybe this would make banks all over Europe more run-prone? Really, REALLY stupid.
I don't understand this- why didn't they just use the hidden inflation tax to confiscate people's wealth. why did they do it above board? that is not normal.
 
Everyone should really take heart at this because it demonstrates that the banking cartel is really NOT very bright. Gee, did it occur to anyone that confiscating people's savings to paper over a bank crisis just MIGHT make people more skittish about leaving their money in banks? And that maybe this would make banks all over Europe more run-prone? Really, REALLY stupid.

My thoughts as well .
 
I don't understand this- why didn't they just use the hidden inflation tax to confiscate people's wealth. why did they do it above board? that is not normal.

It is more complicated for an individual EU member to inflate - they don't control their own currency. This is why Greece, Italy, Spain, etc. have to go begging for bailouts instead of just printing money. And some members of the EU are resisting inflation.
 
Everyone should really take heart at this because it demonstrates that the banking cartel is really NOT very bright. Gee, did it occur to anyone that confiscating people's savings to paper over a bank crisis just MIGHT make people more skittish about leaving their money in banks? And that maybe this would make banks all over Europe more run-prone? Really, REALLY stupid.

They are drunk with power
 
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