Cyprus follows Slovenia euro adoption steps

Cyprus Finance Minister Michalis Sarris and Slovenia’s former Central Bank Governor Mitja Gaspari discussed the experience of Slovenia as regards the adoption of the Euro.
Cyprus along with Malta will adopt the euro on January 1 2008. EU Ministers of Finance (ECOFIN) locked the Cyprus pound to the euro at 0.585274 pounds. Slovenia adopted the Euro on January 1 2007.
Sarris said that Slovenia’s transition to the Euro seemed to be very successful and described as an encouraging message for Cyprus the fact that the main part of the information campaign was held during the last three months of 2006 “because of the danger the campaign to lose its dynamism if they started too early.”
He also said that Slovenia had acted similarly to Cyprus and that inflation trends were very limited during the transition to the euro.
On his part, Gaspari said that Cyprus is very well advanced in the preparation for the introduction of the Euro.
He said the information campaign is one of the important elements of the whole project and should start when the people are ready to listen and are ready to act, noting that “from our own experience, we started our campaign in September and it proved very good decision because we concentrated our efforts on the willingness of the population to listen.”