Corruption Trial Opens for Former Turkish PM

16/02/2005| IslamWeb

Former Turkish prime minister Mesut Yilmaz went on trial to face corruption charges over a banking scandal, becoming the first head of government to be tried by the Supreme Court.

 

Yilmaz, a three-time prime minister and former chairman of the centre-right Motherland Party (ANAP), is on trial along with former economy minister Gunes Taner over the bungled privatization of a state-bank in 1998 in which organized crime was allegedly involved.

 

Both men could face at least 10 years in jail if found guilty of fraud.

 

Yilmaz is accused of determining in advance who should win the tender for Turkbank and resorting to the services of a mafia leader to scare off unwanted bidders.

 

The scandal surfaced when tapes of phone conversations between the businessman who obtained control of the bank and a mafia boss were leaked to the media.

 

The affair led to a no-confidence vote and the collapse of the government led by Yilmaz, who was nevertheless cleared in a parliamentary investigation in 2000 and was never prosecuted.

 

Turkbank's privatisation process was cancelled after the scandal and the bank is in the process of being dissolved after it was seized by the state on grounds that its weak financial structure threatened the entire banking system.

 

Yilmaz and Taner are among six former ministers parliament decided to try before the Supreme Court -- the name under which the constitutional court, Turkey's top tribunal, judges senior public officials -- since the AKP came to power on pledges to stamp out chronic corruption.

The trials came at the end of an in-debt parliamentary inquiry into claims of alleged large-scale fraud in tenders, sell-offs, banking reforms and energy projects over the past decade that reportedly cost Turkey billions of dollars.

 

 

 

PHOTO CAPTION

Former Turkish Prime Minister Mesut Yilmaz. (AFP)