Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan raised money through corruption and the rigging of tenders to launch his political party when he was mayor of Istanbul, Turkey’s most populous city, in the 1990s, documents have revealed.
Turkey’s interior ministry investigative reports and multiple criminal indictments filed by prosecutors against Erdogan and his associates show that the suspects were accused of establishing a criminal enterprise, embezzling public funds, corruption, fraud, abuse of power, forgery of official documents, perjury and other crimes.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan raised money through corruption and the rigging of tenders to launch his political party when he was mayor of Istanbul, Turkey’s most populous city, in the 1990s, documents have revealed.
Senior municipal officials were the subjects of two criminal indictments drafted on March 12, 2002 by the Istanbul Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office and the Eyup district office prosecutor. As a result of internal investigations by interior ministry inspectors into the allegations, 16 municipal officials were removed from their jobs on March 29, 2002.
The reports on criminal allegations show that Erdogan and his associates had devised various schemes including setting up front companies to divert municipal funds and enrich businesspeople who were close to the Islamist Welfare Party, which had controlled the municipality since 1994. They also revealed practices employed by Erdogan to hire people with political Islamist backgrounds while sacking employees who were brought into the local government by his predecessors.
The reports explained that Erdogan had been preparing to run for prime minister after serving as Istanbul mayor and needed funds to run his campaign as well as hire staff. So he siphoned off municipal funds through illegal means in 1994, 1995 and 1996. In total, 18 court cases were launched against Erdogan, but he managed to save himself from legal troubles when he gained parliamentary immunity after his election as a lawmaker.
The corruption investigations that were made public in December 2013 were a perfect example revealing how multi-billion-dollar schemes were envisaged for contracts and tenders by the Erdogan government.
As his wealth and assets had grown, Erdogan purged some 30 percent of all judges and prosecutors (over 4,000 people) from the Turkish judiciary in order to secure his position and not allow any criminal cases to be launched against him, his family or business and political associates.
Four former ministers left their posts after they were implicated in a major corruption and bribery investigation that was revealed to the public in December 2013.
