Our View: Heavy-handed police hotel raid is overkill

It defies belief that more than two dozen police officers raided a hotel in Paphos to check for workers employed illegally. Such a large number of police officers would not have been sent to the scene of a serious crime, yet in the Cyprus of today, illegal workers seem to be regarded as a bigger threat to law and order than criminals.

Hotel guests witnessing this heavy-handedness would have thought they were holidaying in a police state or a tin-pot dictatorship even if the police did not bother them. Yet the mere presence of officers in a hotel lobby was bound to be unsettling to people who were in Cyprus for a holiday, to escape the pressures and stress of their daily lives. It is a bizarre way of ensuring holidaymakers have a memorable experience on the island.

What was the reasoning behind the raid? Had the Labour Minister, Yiannis Panayiotou, decided that a few police raids would frighten hotel owners who employed ineligible workers? Or perhaps he wanted to show the union bosses, who have been clamoring for a crackdown on illegal workers, that he was satisfying their demand in the most draconian manner.

But why had the police command allowed itself to be drawn into this mindless game which could only harm tourism? Since when have 30 officers been sent into private premises to check whether the law has been broken? Were there suspicions that the hotel which was raided was employing workers illegally, had the police received a tip-off from a reliable source or were they operating on the assumption that all hoteliers were law breakers?

If the government has resolved to crack down on illegal workers there are other ways of doing this. Labour ministry inspectors could visit a hotel, as they have done in the case of other businesses and discreetly carried out checks. This is the standard practice, so why was the raid on the Paphos hotel carried out by an army of police? It is as if the authorities have decided that illegal work is a big threat to our society that justifies the allocation large numbers of police officers, to tackle such crimes.

The irony is that hoteliers may have been forced to employ illegal workers in order to operate, given the huge delays in securing approval for the employment of third country nationals from the labour ministry. The tourist season has started, the hotel industry has been complaining about acute labour shortages for months now, while the labour ministry, under pressure from unions, has been dragging its feet on the issuing of permits. What are hotels supposed to do in such circumstances? Tell tourists who have made bookings that the hotel will be closed because it cannot find workers to make it operational?

Checks for illegal workers – not with armies of police – should have been left until after all the applications for foreign workers by hotels had been processed and approved. This would have been the common sense approach, which the labour minister shunned in order to keep union bosses happy.