“I want to inform you that another review procedure by the troika (of international lenders) has been completed with success,” Georgiades told reporters during a lunchtime news conference. The minister said the island’s battered banking sector was in the stage of stabilisation as he announced that significant relaxations to capital controls imposed in March last year should be expected in the coming week. He did not elaborate on what those relaxations would be.

Earlier, a senior European Commission source said Cyprus had met all its fiscal targets with a considerable margin – the first time a bailed out country has done so – suggesting a much better than anticipated starting point for the current year. “Cyprus is clearly outperforming on the targets that have been set at the beginning of the programme. I can also say that that is quite unusual in programme countries,” the commission official said. “It is not the general experience that we have and we’ve had before. Ireland is the example that targets were met, but on the fiscal side I do not recall having seen actual targets being outperformed. That is I think very encouraging,” the source said.

Source: Cyprus Mail