Property developer arrested

A PROPERTY developer who sold hundreds of flats at a sprawling development near Dikmen at knockdown prices before disappearing without transferring the title deeds to the purchasers has been arrested in Turkey, it was reported on Monday.

Temel Bulut was caught in a tea garden in İstanbul last Friday, having been on the run for two-and-a-half years, press reports said. He appeared before the city’s Bakırköy Fifth Criminal Court on Monday and was remanded in custody.

Turkish authorities had issued an arrest warrant for Mr Bulut after he failed to attend a court hearing in the city in July 2016. He was wanted on numerous fraud charges relating to property sales in Turkey and could face a total of up to 910 years in prison if found guilty.

A judge accepted a request from Mr Bulut’s lawyer for his client to appear at the next hearing via video link from prison, due to the number of individual case said to have been filed against him by property victims in Turkey, said to number around 300. “If these people see Temel Bulut here, they will become agitated and it will not be possible to hold a hearing,” the lawyer was quoted as saying.

Mr Bulut’s Bulut Construction built the Evviva Lavinium housing estate near the Lefkoşa-Girne road in 2013. Buyers were enticed with prices of £35,000 for a 140m2 threebedroom flat and as little as £20,000 for a two-bedroom flat and interest-free payment plans of up 10 years. Promotional material at the time hailed the development for allowing “many citizens on limited budgets to become house owners”. However owners complained at a protest last year that their lives had been made a misery for years because of incomplete work at the site.

They said developers had failed to provide any landscaping and a children’s playground, while families who had moved into their apartments had encountered “huge difficulties” and had not been able to obtain their title deeds. Of the 704 flats envisaged, only around half had been completed and foundations for blocks containing another 112 had “not even been laid yet”, they said.

Protesters also accused the government of failing to deliver on promises to give direct access to and from the site from the Girne-Lefkoşa road.