28/05/2014
Owners of property in Cyprus will be asked to pay less Immovable Property Tax this year as many more properties have been included the island’s Interior Minister Socratis Hasikos has stated.“People will be asked to pay less than last year and the reason is very simple, many more properties have been included,” Interior Minister Socratis Hasikos told state broadcaster CyBC.
As part of the bailout, Cyprus has to update real estate values by mid-2014.Up until 2013, property owners were taxed based on 1980s values with many paying peanuts and others nothing at all.The minister said the re-evaluation procedure was almost complete though Cyprus had another big challenge to address – title deeds. Cyprus must cut down the number of pending applications to 2,000 by the end of the year in line with the bailout terms.
This is a very big operation and employees from other departments have been brought in to help the land registry, Hasikos said.“These are matters that we should have sorted on our own years ago but we didn’t and the troika (lenders) had to step in,” the minister said. “In this instance, they are welcome.”
