NICOSIA, July 9 (Xinhua) -- Cyprus's President Nicos Anastasiades did not accept Finance Minister Harris Georgiades's resignation offer despite strong demands by all opposition parties, a statement said on Monday.
The demands were repeated after parliament passed Sunday night urgent legislation permitting government guarantees needed to complete a deal for the takeover of ailing state-owned Cyprus Cooperative Bank by Hellenic Bank.
The opposition accused the minister of being responsible for the collapse of the bank and its selling to Hellenic Bank under unfavorable conditions for the state, including the issue of a 2.5-billion-euro bond in favor of the purchaser and guarantees against unforeseen future losses.
Georgiades said that he had offered his resignation from the first moment demands were made several days ago.
In a reply to the opposition's demands, Anastasiades said "I believed and I still believe that accepting it would not be warranted since the Cyprus Cooperative Bank's problems were neither created nor were result of political decisions by the finance minister."
He said Georgiades enjoys his "absolute trust" because he achieved a turnaround of the economy which stood at the verge of disaster and is now on a course of steady and viable development.
Georgiades was generally credited with leading the economy from its 2013 tatters to a galloping growth and surplus budgets.
However, Cyprus's highly partisan opposition never accepted that the Cypriot economy really recovered after the eastern Mediterranean island's 10-billion-euro bailout by the Eurogroup and the International Monetary Fund, claiming that its progress was shallow and deceptive.
The Cyprus Cooperative Bank crisis offered the opposition a chance to get even with the government.
Georgiades said he offered his resignation to the president so as to facilitate his moves, but challenged his critics to wait until the conclusion of a probe which started on Monday into the demise of the Cyprus Cooperative Bank.
The Attorney General, who mandated a three-member commission to carry out an in-depth probe, called its members to carry out a complete, documented and objective investigation and come up with a report with conclusions, analyses and explanations of what happened at the Cyprus Cooperative Bank.
"We do not want to become viewers of the same play again," he said.
