Turkey to buy north Cyprus?

Sunday, March 7, 2010

By Dominic Freeman

Greek Cypriots are starting to wake up and realise the impact of the ECHR’s decision to make the Immovable Property Commission the first stop for their property issues. The only other alternative is to await a solution. The expectation is that once a solution seems to be only a distant possiblity, GCs will start to flock to the IPC hoping that it will be a slightly more immediate. Even then, some observers believe, it will be 5-7 years before compensation or restitution is decided.

One reason that GCs may prefer the IPC to waiting for a solution is that their economy may start to melt down under their own requirement to pay TCs compensation. This, on top of the current economic uncertainty, could have a serious impact on individual GC finances. Cash strapped GCs might be pursuaded to take the cash and run, especially if the GC government can no longer prevent them from doing so.

Interestingly, even though the cost to Turkey may be anything from £2-20bn what they receive in return is a surprising bonus. If every GC were to use the IPC, OK I know that’s never going to happen, then what Turkey ends up with is ownership of much of the GC property in the north, to dispose of as they wish. Let’s face it, what they wish is for north Cyprus to become Turkish. In the end they could own well over 50% of property and the impact of this could be that very few GCs get to live and vote in the north. Thus partition would not be needed.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, March 7th, 2010 at 12:41 pm and is filed under Cyprus Problem, Property. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

Ian Edwards

07/03/2010 at 2:42 pm

Hey Dominic, I’m getting confused.

Are you saying that should the IPC make financial restitution to a GC for, say, a piece of land now covered with 14 villas, that it would then be Turkey who would own the villas, and not the people who paid money for them to a builder or a previous owner?

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Dominic Freeman

07/03/2010 at 3:50 pm

Hi Ian, Turkey would have paid the compensation and would, in theory own the property, but have sort of promised to honour TRNC title deed holders. I doubt very much they would upset foreign buyers by doing anything which would damage the construction industry but there is a suspicion that they would want to control GC purchases of property in some way. If they didn’t then rich GCs could gradually buy up property in the north, move GCs into them and use their votes to influence the politics of the north. A bit far fetched but possible. However, if Turkey enter the EU then they would have less say on who buys in the north. Many GCs are saying that the RoC should reverse their policy of hindering Turkey’s EU accession because inside the EU there would be a better chance of controlling her.

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