Cyprus Stock Exchange Has An Exciting Week

Tax-news.com

31 October 1999

The troubled Cyprus Stock Exchange seems to be hooked on excitement: the CSE Council suspended eight top brokers on Tuesday last week because of an excessive number of failed trades, and threatened to suspend a number of leading public companies for not delivering stock. Coming soon after the Government's threat to impose a 1% levy on trades, it was enough to unsettle the market, which dropped nearly 10% from its all time high of last week; but it bounced back on Friday following bullish news from Louis Cruise Lines to close at 579.92, just 5% below last week's high.

Trading has been distorted by the ceiling of 2,000 trades a day, imposed to avoid a repetition of the summer's enforced closures; but the cap is being removed from Monday. It had the effect of squeezing out individual investors, since the automated order-matching system regularly notched up 3,000 trades before open trading began. It remains to be seen whether the public will now pile into, or pile out of, the astonishing Cyprus Stock Exchange, capitalised today at Cy£11.6bn compared with Cy£2bn last January.

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