Turkey’s murky money business
ATurkish businessman, Sezgin Baran Korkmaz, was arrested in Austria this month at the instigation of the US authorities.
The controversial 43-year-old, better known by his initials SBK, started his working life as a shoeshine boy before rising up through the business world with vertiginous speed. He ultimately became a billionaire known for generously distributing money for humanitarian purposes. He purchased, for relatively modest amounts, companies that were in financial difficulty, rehabilitated them and sold them for exorbitant prices.
His name came back on to the agenda last month, when Sedat Peker, a ringleader in Turkey’s criminal underworld, mentioned it to embarrass Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu. He claimed that Soylu had received SBK last December and intimated to him that a legal procedure had been initiated against him and that he should leave Turkey at once. SBK followed the minister’s advice and left the country the following day.
The opposition media in Turkey questions whether it was appropriate for an interior minister to share insider information about a businessman’s potential arrest. The affair has now become more complicated as new irregularities have surfaced about SBK, which means a bigger headache for Turkey. This incident is likely to remain a thorny issue in Turkish-US relations.
The Turkish government has chosen to keep a low profile because there is little ammunition left to fight back with.
As if the affair was not complicated enough, SBK, a few days before his arrest, had opened a new debate by claiming that
Veyis Ates, a veteran media figure in the pro-government television channel Haberturk, called him and proposed eliminating his problems. He released part of a telephone recording, in which Ates says: “If you give me 10 million euros ($12 million), I may help sort out your problems with the Turkish authorities through influential people.” SBK leaked only a threeminute segment of the recorded conversation and refused to release the remainder to avoid the disclosure of the names of important people.
The Austrian authorities may extradite SBK to the US, as Washington was the first to place an extradition request.
But they may prefer to extradite him to Turkey because he is a Turkish citizen.
If SBK, who faces a lengthy prison sentence if convicted in the US, cooperates with prosecutors, what he says could cause serious embarrassment for many important people in Turkey. However, if he is tried in the Turkish courts, he may not go to jail at all because the country’s laws are not severe when it comes to punishing money laundering. Even if he is convicted, the Turkish parliament may pass another law to pardon his financial irregularities, as it has done several times in the past. Transparency is going steadily downhill in Turkey.
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