Cyprus Editorial: One stop shop must be seen to be believed

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Interior Minister Constantinos Petrides, initially charged with reforming the public sector, has been busy of late, announcing measures to boost business. In September, he made two announcements; one for a bill revising licensing processes for strategic developments and a few days later an announcement for incentives to attract investors in the film and audio-visual sectors.

And only last week, Minister Petrides made a ‘significant’ declaration, that the one-stop-shop for setting up businesses would be up and running within the first half of 2018.

Although the first two announcements could be regarded as a breakthrough of some sort, the one-stop-shop deal, alas, is an old wagon that has been going round and round for years, decades even.

The setup, as announced, is not far different from what is already in place and all that was needed so far was to get government departs to cooperate with each other.

Of course, the question is why is the Minister of the Interior involved, at a time when investments (cinema, strategic investments) falls within the mandate of the Finance Minister, yet the one-stop-shop is purely a Commerce Ministry affair. Is it that the technicality of the visa issue and paperwork regarding residency is now at the forefront? If that is the case, then why was nothing done in the past nearly five years of the current administration, and all of the government before that?

As much as the business community would like to hail the ‘breakthrough’ of the one-stop-shop as a major achievement, perhaps this is one declaration that we will have to wait and see, as surely, by then, the usual culprits will try to throw a spanner in the works, either by not cooperating between departments or just moving slowly, as has been the case of the last 20 years, at least.