A Seat at the Table, Not a Free Pass: Reading OEB’s Welcome to the Vaping Sector
In August 2026, the Employers and Industrialists Federation of Cyprus — known as OEB — announced that the Cyprus Vaping Association had been included in the ranks of its Member Associations. The wording of that announcement is worth reading closely. OEB described the inclusion as further strengthening the representation of businesses operating in emerging and regulated sectors of the economy. That is a specific and deliberate characterisation. It places vaping businesses in a category that is no longer simply novel, and not yet fully settled: a sector that exists, employs people, trades across borders, and is subject to rules that continue to take shape.
The closing passage of the same announcement carries the substance of the welcome. OEB welcomed the Cyprus Vaping Association to its family and expressed confidence that the cooperation would contribute to the promotion of responsible entrepreneurship and to the development of an operating framework that combines the protection of public health with business activity. That sentence is the heart of the matter, because it describes a framework with two load-bearing walls rather than one. Neither wall holds up the structure on its own.
For an emerging sector, this framing matters practically. New categories of product tend to arrive ahead of the institutions that supervise them, and the gap is usually filled by improvisation — by businesses interpreting unclear obligations in whatever way protects the margin, and by authorities reacting after the fact. An operating framework is the alternative to that improvisation. It gives companies a predictable set of expectations to build against, and it gives regulators a counterpart that speaks with a single organised voice rather than a scatter of individual commercial interests.
The scope represented by the new member makes the point concrete. According to the announcement, the Cyprus Vaping Association represents companies active in manufacturing, wholesale and retail trade, as well as in the export of vaping products, contributing to the development of a dynamic and outward-looking sector of the Cypriot economy. Manufacturing, distribution, retail and export are four different kinds of exposure to risk and to regulation. A framework that satisfies all four simultaneously cannot be written as a marketing statement; it has to be written as an operational one. That is what OEB’s welcome implicitly asks for, and it is why the phrase public health protection sits in the same sentence as business activity rather than in a separate paragraph of good intentions.
From June to September: Turning a Founding Group into a Working Body
The Cyprus Vaping Association was founded in 2026 under the auspices of OEB, with the main aim of promoting correct information and responsible communication about vaping. That purpose statement is narrow by design, and it maps neatly onto the framework language of the OEB announcement: correct information is what a regulator needs in order to legislate sensibly, and responsible communication is what a sector needs in order to be trusted with the space to operate.
The Founding Assembly was held in June 2026, and it elected the seven people who make up the Board of Directors. The announcement named Antonis Sotiriou, Christos Tamamounas, Stavros Charalambous, Christos Savva, Steve Towler, Kostas Nikolaou and Nikolas Papasolomontos, and stated that the Board would be formed into a body at its next meeting. That detail is a small but telling one: a founding assembly produces a group of people, not yet a functioning board with defined responsibilities.
That step followed in September 2026, when the association elected its Board of Directors positions at a meeting held at the OEB Building in Nicosia. The resulting roster is now published: Kostas Nikolaou as President, Christos Tamamounas as Vice President, Stavros Charalambous as Secretary, Steve Towler as Treasurer, Nikolas Papasolomontos as Director of International Affairs, and Antonis Sotiriou and Christos Savva as Board Members. The same seven names appear at both stages — first as elected members, later with defined offices. For anyone assessing whether a trade body is ready to participate in a regulatory conversation, that continuity is more informative than any statement of intent.
It is also worth being precise about what these titles denote. They are institutional roles and nothing more; no biographies, employment histories or mandates have been published alongside them, and the Director of International Affairs title indicates a function rather than an inventory of foreign engagements. The relevant fact is structural: an association that can convene a founding assembly in June and then distribute responsibilities in September is an association capable of speaking for its members in a sustained way. The priorities that follow from that structure, and the record of how CVA Cyprus presents them publicly, are set out in the goals the association has stated it will pursue through the collective action of its Members in collaboration with OEB.
Six Goals, One Operating Framework
The goals list is short, and each item addresses a different pressure point of the same framework. The first is to implement legislation prohibiting the sale of vaping products to minors and to prevent any form of commercial practice that could attract minors. It is important to note the verb: this is a goal the association says it will promote, not a rule it has already enacted. The distinction matters both legally and reputationally, because a trade association can advocate for a strong rule; it cannot substitute itself for the legislature that adopts it.
The second goal is the promotion of responsible business activity in the vaping products market, and the fifth returns to the same theme from a different angle: consolidation of the professional ethics of Members in full compliance with the national and European regulatory framework. Read together, they describe a compliance posture that is meant to be verifiable rather than aspirational. The third goal — informing consumers and competent authorities on vaping-related issues — is what converts that posture into something regulators can actually use, since a framework is only as good as the quality of information circulating inside it.
The fourth goal requires careful phrasing because it is frequently misread. The association states that it will utilise the scientific debate around vaping as a potential low-risk alternative option for adult smokers. Those three elements — the word potential, the limitation to adult smokers, and the frame of an ongoing scientific debate — are the whole point. This is a stated goal about engaging with a discussion, and it should not be converted into a health finding, a claim of safety, or a cessation claim. Nor does the association’s own material treat it as one. It is a position on where the evidence sits, held openly, in a sector where the evidence is contested.
The sixth goal is strengthening dialogue with the State for the adoption of evidence-based and balanced public health policies. Balanced, in this context, is not a synonym for lenient. It describes an outcome in which restrictions are proportionate to the risk the evidence supports, and in which legitimate manufacturing, wholesale, retail and export activity is not collateral damage from rules drafted without industry input. That is precisely the operating framework OEB described in August 2026 — protection of public health on one side, business activity on the other, and a member association capable of standing at the junction and being held to both.
