The citizenship-by-investment scheme’s contribution to economic growth in the past three years was just 1.2% of 13 percentage points, Finance Minister Harris Georgiades said recently, as the cabinet tightened procedures for applicants to the programme, which has been criticised by the EU as lacking transparency.

Non-performing exposures (NPEs) in Cyprus banks recorded an increase of €87 million in October 2018 compared with September 2018, despite the fact that they remained unchanged as a ratio to total loans.

The share of energy from renewable sources (expressed in per cent of gross final energy consumption) reached 9.9% in 2017 in Cyprus, according to Eurostat.

The EastMed pipeline could be “one of the greatest underwater projects in the world”, Israel’s President Reuven Rivlin said recently.

According to the ninth annual global bank risk management survey, Accelerating digital transformation: four imperatives for risk management, it is clear that as technology and ongoing competitive disruption force banks to reinvent themselves, the risk management function must undergo a revolution in risk management professionals balancing their roles and operating models.

The percentage of women in science and technology professions in Cyprus is 45.6%, according to a Eurostat study published on occasion of the International Day of Women and Girls in Science, celebrated on February 11.

The agreement signed between Egypt and Cyprus for the Aphrodite gas field resulted to great interest from International oil companies, down-streamers and financial institutions, Egypt’s Minister of Petroleum and Mineral Resources Tarek El-Molla said.

Total is committed to continuing its exploration work in Cyprus, chief executive Patrick Pouyanne told Reuters recently, part of a major exploration campaign for 2019 focused on areas known to contain commercial levels of oil and gas.

The government has decided on amendments in the criteria for acquiring a Cypriot passport under the Cyprus Investment Programme, the press reports.

International ratings agency Fitch has said that the decline in Cypriot banks’ non-performing exposures “significantly reduces” contingent liabilities to the sovereign, adding however that the banking sector “remains weak” and that further reductions of bad loans would partly depend on the effective use of legal tools adopted in the previous year.