A four-day strike at Cyprus Turkish Petroleum’s (K-Pet) Kalecik fuel terminal ended late Saturday after management withdrew redundancy notices for nine workers. The walk-out had halted deliveries to K-Pet filling stations across the north and threatened to spill over into the Republic, where thousands of drivers regularly cross the Green Line to take advantage of lower pump prices. Trade-union federation Dev-Is said the company agreed to redeploy the employees rather than sack them, clearing the way for tanker trucks to resume loading early Sunday. The terminal handles roughly 70 percent of northern Cyprus’ retail fuel and supplies generators at several tourist resorts that cater to European package-holiday traffic. During the stoppage, the Republic’s Ministry of Energy monitored fuel flows at southern depots and confirmed that contingency stocks were sufficient, but cross-border taxi and coach operators reported queues at mixed-village stations as Greek-Cypriot motorists rushed to fill up before anticipated shortages. Tour operators had warned that a prolonged outage could force them to reroute excursion coaches via more expensive southern suppliers, raising costs for winter-sun packages. With the strike resolved, K-Pet said deliveries would normalise within 24 hours and prices would remain unchanged. For mobility managers, the episode highlights the interdependence of the island’s two energy markets and the potential knock-on effects industrial action in the north can have on business travel logistics in the south. Companies with cross-border fleets are reviewing contingency plans, including dual-sided fuel cards and minimum-reserve policies.
Source: Cyprus Mail
