Ex-advisers seek permanent roles after Anastasiades’ precedent

Former president Nicos Anastasiades’ decision to make four contract advisers permanent civil service employees has set a precedent that more former advisers are seeking to benefit from, it emerged on Thursday.

So far, three former advisers of the current government under President Nikos Christodoulides have threatened they will take legal action citing their dismissals as unlawful.

Under Anastasiades, his niece, two of his secretaries and another adviser, had filed to be classed as permanent employees in the civil service, instead of contract employees.

The four women had filed the complaint with the Social Insurance Department, just as their contracts were about to be terminated, as Anastasiades was ending his term as president.

Anastasiades’ four advisers were recruited to work at the Presidential palace in March 2013, on fixed-term contracts, daily Politis reported. Previously, they worked for Disy.

The contracts of all four of them stipulated that their period of employment at the palace would be terminated either by decision of Anastasiades or at the end of his first term of office, i.e., on March 1, 2018.

As it turned out, the contract that the four were asked to sign, like the rest of the advisers to the state officials during the period in question, was full of loopholes and allowed for their permanent employment in the state, by converting their contract from fixed term to indefinite term.

Thus, five years later and specifically on February 20, 2018, on the eve of the end of the term of office of Anastasiades, all four submitted a written request to the director of the social insurance department to recognise that, according to the conditions of their employment, an employer-employee relationship exists and that after the completion of 30 months from the beginning of their employment at the palace, they have become permanent employees.

Six days later, in an express reply, the director of the social insurance department informed them in writing that, “after conducting an investigation and evaluating all the facts and information”, it was decided that their employment constituted the employment of permanent staff, which satisfied their request.

Anastasiades’ then chief of staff Theodosis Tsiolas informed the finance ministry’s personnel department that there was no objection to making the four women permanent employees at the palace.

Attempts afterwards in 2022 to fire the four employees, fell through, despite an audit service report uncovering the terms of employment for the four.

The four women took the case to court in May 2023 and won, allowing them to continue working in the public sector.

All this has opened a can of worms for Christodoulides, who last March was required to terminate the contracts of three women because of the law passed by the parliament on the minimum qualifications of advisers.

In this case, the three female advisers did not hold a degree.

The three advisers to the current government, whose contracts were terminated last March, have threatened to go to court.

Two were employed in the deputy minister of shipping’s office and the third in the presidential office and were hired as consultants under the Anastasiades administration.

The three consultants warned parliament, through their lawyers, that if they were to vote in favour of the law setting out the minimum qualifications for advisers to the President of the Republic and ministers – deputy ministers with retroactive effect, a development which would lead to their dismissal, since they did not have a university degree – they would go to court claiming damages for illegal dismissal.

The consultants who did not have a degree requested through their lawyers that what applied to the case of the associates of MPs and parties in the parliament be applied, where a similar law was passed in 2019 that defines their qualifications, but without retroactive effect.

As a result, people who do not have a degree are kept in their positions as parliamentary and party associates. Some of these persons continue to work in parliament today and are paid by the state.