18 March 2013/06 Jumada l-Ula 1434/28 Esfand 1391/07 Yi-Mao (2nd month) 4711

The people of Cyprus are almost up in arms over a heavy tax that could be imposed on their bank accounts.  The tax is part of a privately funded bailout deal from Too Big to Jail European banks.  The tax would go to those banks, not to any government.

Banks in Cyprus have closed their branch offices and turned off their ATMs to try and stop the wave of people who want to withdrawal all their money.

Germany’s Deutsche Welle (DW) is reporting that the bank account tax is a “test case”, and could be imposed on other countries: “People feel anger first of all, and fear. I saw people waiting in front of ATMs over the weekend who were shouting: ‘Why are they doing this to us? Is this some kind of an experiment?’ They say Cyprus is seen as a small country that can be the test tube for the whole of Europe. If this is going to work here, they say, it’s going to be applied in other countries. Cypriots are angry because they say they’ve been working for years and now somebody comes and steals their money.”-Flora Alexandrou, journalist

It’s not just individual account holders who’ll be forced to pay the new corporate imposed tax, but businesses, investors and even other banks!

The bank account tax is going to hit Russian banks hard, because they’ve got big bucks in Cypriot bank accounts. It’s reported that Russia’s second biggest bank will end up paying 130 million euros ($168 million USD) in taxes!  So what happens if Russia’s banks pullout the tens of billions they have in Cypriot banks?

Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin, called the European banks’ imposed tax “unjust, unprofessional and dangerous.”