How much will the sale of the GSI and an imminent NAVTEX notice affect the Cyprus problem?

Opinion Cyprus problemeconomyenergyGreat Sea Interconnector How much will the sale of the GSI and an imminent NAVTEX notice affect the Cyprus problem? Symfwnia Kalwdio Relevant News How much will the sale of the GSI and an imminent NAVTEX notice affect the Cyprus problem? 10 August 2026 And yet they’re desperate to be in government by 2028 10 August 2026 History cannot change. But it can teach us something. 10 August 2026 Chrysanthos Manoli 10 August 2026 FacebookXWhatsAppEmailPrintViber It’s a welcome development that the Democratic Rally’s Government Monitoring Council has, for some time now, made a habit of weighing in on energy matters. The country’s largest party has finally dropped the slapdash, slogan-heavy, and at times downright contradictory interventions it used to make on energy issues of genuinely colossal importance. It also, at long last, stopped letting former Energy Committee chair Kyriakos Hatzigiannis speak for the party on energy. His positions were near-identical to those of organised private interests, chiefly those heavily invested in solar power generation. It was well known, long before the parliamentary elections, that plenty of people within DISY held views, thankfully, quite different from Mr Hatzigiannis’s and those of whoever else was working behind him. Plenty of the Monitoring Council’s positions rest on solid arguments. Others exist purely to tear down government policy and play opposition for opposition’s sake, even on issues where the actual disagreement is hard to spot. Maybe because there isn’t one. Set the Monitoring Council’s statements side by side with the party’s old line, as voiced by Hatzigiannis and other members of the previous Energy Committee, and the gap becomes obvious, especially on the electricity interconnector. Neither Hatzigiannis nor Averof Neophytou ever looked kindly on the interconnector, though that doesn’t automatically mean their concerns and reservations were wrong. But we can hardly ignore just how far DISY’s position has shifted, from before the elections to after them. Today, DISY can’t wait to see the interconnector built. Never mind that it was locked in as a project under the Anastasiades government, and locked in, at that, to the benefit of a company that turned out, in practice, to be incapable of pulling off a project of this scale. Something the European Commission had already flagged, officially if not publicly, after the fact, once the Christodoulides government took over. Democratic Rally’s Monitoring Council would do well not to forget that rather important “detail.” Nor should the party’s Monitoring Council skip past another “detail”: IPTO, Greece’s grid operator, didn’t prove ready or able to carry the project forward either. And we’re not even talking about the geopolitical hurdle itself, or Turkey’s objections to it. Under the regulatory decisions in place, if the project runs aground for geopolitical reasons or other force majeure, it’s electricity consumers who’ll be left holding the bill. IPTO couldn’t finance this project. Neither could EuroAsia, which is why it got shown the door, with IPTO stepping in as its replacement. IPTO couldn’t find the funding for a long-haul project like this either, and now it too is being eased out, perhaps of its own accord, with Meridiam taking its place. IPTO will carry on handling the technical side, since it’s clearly got the know-how, but Meridiam now holds the upper hand. Anyone who’s spent this whole saga glossing over IPTO’s inability to fund the interconnector or bring in other investors, while holding the Cypriot government fully responsible for the reservations and the distance it kept from the project’s operator, might want to do a bit of soul-searching today. In a report in today’s edition, Phileleftheros notes that the Cypriot government’s position remains unchanged: it will pay what it committed to pay under the two-year-old framework agreement with the Greek government once a NAVTEX notice is issued for the seabed surveys. In its latest statement, Democratic Rally’s Monitoring Council does separate the outstanding payment from the NAVTEX notice, rightly, in this column’s view, but still calls for the long-debated NAVTEX to be issued as soon as possible. And that’s something bound to dominate public debate sooner or later. Turkey has made it clear it intends to act as overseer and licence-issuer for any surveys carried out in the maritime area it unilaterally claims as its own continental shelf, something neither the Greek nor the Cypriot government can accept. Does anything actually change now that cooperation with the Turkish authorities becomes the responsibility of the GSI’s owner, the French private firms Meridiam and Nexans? Will Turkey find it easier to hold off on reactions and threats simply because it’s dealing with French companies rather than the Greek state? Will Meridiam and Nexans find it easier to secure, without political uproar, the permits Turkey insists on issuing unilaterally? This column doesn’t know. But we all know that in the coming weeks, talks between the Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot sides, along with the guarantor powers, will reach a peak, with the UN, aimed at convening a new 5+1 conference to restart negotiations. The unresolved question over the sea area southeast of Kasos, and a possible NAVTEX notice as early as this autumn, as reported in Greece, is unlikely to help deliver the “adequate preparation” António Guterres has been calling for. The renewed push on the electricity interconnector investment comes at exactly the moment when even the slightest friction needs to be avoided. 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