In a bid to rein in its non performing loans, the Housing Finance Corporation (HFC) will hire additional staff to handle arrears, the organisation’s chairman Loizos Papacharalambous told MPs recently.

US-based Noble Energy will declare gas reserves discovered offshore Cyprus commercially viable by the end of March 2015, the government said recently.

The ENI-KOGAS consortium will announce soon the results of their exploratory drilling at the offshore Amathusa prospect, energy minister Giorgos Lakkotrypis said recently.

Natural gas from the Aphrodite gas field can be channelled to Cyprus for domestic energy consumption as well as to regional exports, the head of theCyprus Hydrocarbons Company (CHC) Toula Onoufriou said recently.

Cyprus is on the verge of moving from natural gas exploration to exploitation, Minister of Energy Giorgos Lakkotrypis said addressing the Eastern Mediterranean Gas Conference.

Without legislation to recoup non-performing loans, it will take ten years to deal with the extent of bad loans at the island’s banks, according to a report in the Financial Times (FT).

The Finance Ministry said it further relaxed capital controls introduced following the March 2013 banking crisis.

The economy shrank for the 14th consecutive quarter between October and December 2014, albeit at a slower pace, compared to the same quarter in 2013, suggesting that the recession would be lower than Troika's estimates for 2014.

Eurobank Cyprus Ltd, the wholly-owned subsidiary of one of the big four banks in Greece, recorded a 10% rise in profits to €38.6 mln in 2014, up from €35 mln the previous year, defying the negative economic climate in both countries.

The harmonised deflation rate accelerated to 0.8% in February 2015 compared to 0.7% in January, mainly on reduced energy prices, the statistical service said recently.