Cyprus's eurozone "bailout" should more properly be called blackmail (Cyprus bailout: big implications in a small-scale rescue, 17 March). Half-baked, inequitable, flawed, selectively vindictive, counter-productive, downright hostile to a small island whose main fault was its overexposure to Greece, which became the cause of its troubles following the Greek bailout haircut imposed by eurozone financial authorities last year. This is double punishment by the same people.
UK Cypriots, including those with deposits on the island who have been adversely affected by this fundamentally unjust haircut, will stand by Cyprus during this difficult period.
But EU solidarity should have been in greater evidence than it was in Brussels last Saturday.
The eurozone financial authorities and the IMF should be more circumspect about imposing drastic and inequitable solutions that could have serious repercussions not only in Cyprus but also in other financially over-stretched European economies and the whole eurozone banking system.
Peter Droussiotis
President, National Federation of Cypriots in the UK
• The Dutch finance minister, Jeroen Dijsselbloem, says that taking up to 10% of savings from Cyprus bank accounts is not to punish Cypriots. It does not feel like that here. It feels like collective punishment. Tens of thousands of honest, hard-working people, including thousands of British retirees, will now pay for a crisis that we did not cause.
Dr Michael Paraskos
Director, Cyprus College of Art, Larnaca, Cyprus
• I can't quite work out why there is such anger about the Cypriot bank levy. We regularly see the pound fall because of the mishandling of our economy and prices rise, for example that of petrol, with no real upset. Within the euro the government of Cyprus's mismanagement doesn't reduce the value of its currency. What is the difference that 10% of savers' money is lost in one way or another? At least they may put the levy to good use, instead of it evaporating away, as our savings and earnings do.
Martin Cooper
Bromley, Kent
• So a new line has been crossed as savers' deposits in Cyprus banks are raided by the Cypriot government in a move underwritten by the EU in Brussels. This latest tactic to shore up unsustainable banking may have begun on that small island in the Mediterranean but I doubt it will stop there.
Meanwhile, here in Britain George Osborne et al continue digging the economic black hole this government began in 2010, wedded to the old economic orthodoxy of the 1930s, that somehow austerity is good. Remember where that got us?
Most ordinary people in this country of course don't have savings to be raided, they just have debts. To the privileged few who have savings now – I'd watch out!
Sean McGrath
London
• As the Cypriot banking system has been widely used as a tax haven and for laundering money, why not limit the proposed tax to non-residents? It would probably not make a great deal of difference in the amount collected, as the non-resident funds appear to be huge.
Emanuel de Kadt
Brighton
• I can't help feeling that the Cypriot raid on savings is not entirely different from what political control of interest rates has done to bonsai my retirement money tree in the UK.
Mike Brown
Newcastle upon Tyne
• If the result of the tax on deposits is that people in other weak economies like Italy, Spain and Portugal now withdraw their savings, it might well bring down the entire eurozone. Samson and the pillars of the temple spring to mind.
Ralph Blumenau
London
• I used to think Karl Marx's definition of banks in capitalist society as "institutions created for the systematic robbery of the people" as cheap polemic. Now I begin to see what he meant.
Patrick Renshaw
Sheffield
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