Court rejects Phedonos’ appeal against suspension

The court of appeal on Wednesday rejected suspended Paphos mayor Phedonas Phedonos’ appeal against his suspension. He had been suspended from his duties by Interior Minister Constantinos Ioannou in February after he was accused of rape and domestic abuse. Since being suspended, he has been paid a third of his mayoral salary by the state. His suspension will end either when legal proceedings regarding the allegations levelled against them have concluded. If he then returns to his duties, he will be entitled to the full amount of the salaries he had lost during his suspension. Allegations of domestic abuse against Phedonos surfaced after social media personality Ioanna Photiou, better known by her alias Annie Alexui, claimed to hold documents from the related to admissions of Phedonos’ wife Louiza Andreou to the Nicosia general hospital in 2017, which stated that she had been “beaten” by Phedonos. Andreou has vehemently denied all accusations made against her husband, writing in a post on social media that “my family is being subjected to a coordinated attack”. “Everyone who really knows me, in my workplace, in our extended family, our friends, know that I am not a victim and that I have no fear. I have lived harmoniously with my husband for 20 years. I assure you that he is a wonderful man, decent and honest, and I am truly proud of him and the battles he is fighting,” she wrote. The government earlier appeared keen to take Photiou’s accusations seriously, however, with Justice Minister Costas Fitiris having extended an olive branch in her direction after the accusations were levelled, saying that there are “ways to get around” the arrest warrants put out in her name, so as to allow her to make a statement. Photiou is currently in self-imposed exile in Russia, but Fitiris suggested that a team from the Republic of Cyprus could travel to Russia to take a statement from her, or that Photiou could make a statement through “a lawyer in Cyprus whom she trusts”. The allegations of rape surfaced in February, when Paphos-based land developer Theodoros Aristodemou, of Aristo Developers, accused him of committing the crime around ten years ago, before giving a statement to the police. Aristodemou has had various run-ins with Phedonos and the Paphos municipality in recent years, having been referred for trial in 2014 alongside his wife and two associates over alleged fraudulent demarcation of 177 plots of land within municipal boundaries. It had been alleged at the time that thousands of square metres of land which had originally been designated as green space were reassigned to a development company, but the four were cleared by the Paphos criminal court the following year. An appeal was filed against the acquittal, but the verdict was upheld by the supreme court in 2019, which found that while the paperwork contained irregularities, there had been “no deliberate attempt to secure planning permission under false pretences” on the part of Aristodemou, his wife, or his associates.