Turkey’s visible corruption is a measure of unaccountable politicians and undemocratic institutions


John Lubbock
Last Updated On: Dec 05 2020 
http://ahval.co/en-101833

British people used to like to think that corruption was something that happened in backwater parts of the southern Mediterranean, where European Union funds were stolen by shady mafia figures. It wasn’t something that honest British people did. But when governments stay in power for a long time, they tend to build up patronage networks that have spent a lot of money helping the party, and expect something in return.

At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the UK government needed to get lots of medical supplies quickly and so abandoned normal public sector procurement practices. This resulted in the government turning to companies that had never made medical supplies before, but nevertheless were awarded huge contracts to supply materials which in some cases were unusable. Some of these companies turned out to have links to the UK government.

This will not be an unfamiliar story to many Turkish people. It is well known in Turkey that if you want to get government contracts, you need to be friendly with the Turkish government. And in many cases, friendly companies are overpaid for work they have done.

Economist Emin Çapa recently asked on Twitter: “Remember the Ovid Tunnel scandal? You know, 17 million lira was paid to Cengiz Construction for 19 thousand lira of work. It turned out that 21.5 million lira were paid for the lighting of the tunnel for what should have been about 6 million lira payment. Doesn't anyone care about the Court of Accounts reports in this country anymore? Isn't there a prosecutor?”

The Court of Accounts is Turkey’s supreme auditing institution, which “performs audits on behalf of the parliament with the aim of ensuring the power of the purse and has judicial authority”.

In another recent case, a company hired by the Ministry of Transport was found to have been overpaid by 752 million lira. One of the partners of the company was Yasemin Açık, who had been a Justice and Development Party (AKP) parliamentary candidate for Elazığ in 2018.

Turkish news site Gerçek Gündem said: “Auditors of the Court of Accounts, who examined the financial accounts of the Ministry of Transport and Infrastructure, found irregularities in the tender for the construction of infrastructure for the railway connection of Adapazarı-Karasu ports and industrial facilities. Five different audit findings documented that payments were made to the contractor firm well above the tender price.”

These kinds of stories are becoming so common in Turkey that they are no longer surprising.

Yeniçağ reported the Court of Accounts had found 532 million lira unaccounted for in the budget of the Ministry of Commerce, and companies that received contracts were secretly buying vehicles which were not subject to auditing by the Court of Accounts.

Journalist Murat Ağirel said in the report: “The Court of Accounts summed up the scandal in a single sentence: ‘In total, 562,130,000 lira worth of errors were caused in the balance sheet and footnotes for 2019 and in the operating results table.’ It is not known where this money was spent, where it was given to!”

Corruption in the Turkish construction industry has been particularly noted in the past 10 years, with the Turkish government building close relations with some big building companies as it aims to complete more of the monumental construction projects which have symbolised the AKP’s success to many Turks.

Economist Bahadır Özgür compared the value of construction project tenders which had been won by four well-known construction companies to their stated income and the tax they had paid.

“Four famous builders; Received 56.7 billion lira tender in four years. The income they declare in four years is 2.8 billion lira. Corporate tax is 451 million lira accrued in four years Of course, we do not know if they even paid this…”

A January 2020 GAN report found: “Corruption is widespread in Turkey’s public and private sectors. Public procurement and construction projects are particularly prone to corruption, and bribes are often demanded.”

The build-operate-transfer model, a public-private partnership scheme for infrastructure development, has come under particular scrutiny as being vulnerable to corruption. A private company builds infrastructure, like a hospital, which is then rented by the state from the company for a certain period of time. But a lack of any anti-corruption strategy or proper judicial recourse was identified by the EU in its latest report on corruption in Turkey.

SoL newspaper recently reported: “In the first 10 months of 2020, the hospitals built with the ‘build - rent transfer model’ were paid 5,381,914,630 lira as the rental price and 2,606,251,633 lira as the service price.”

Meanwhile, billions of lira in loans have been awarded to AKP-friendly companies for work on mega projects which may have little economic justification.

“Loans from three public banks for 7 mega projects amount to $10 billion. These are just what we know. Payments started from last year. Well, if any instalments have been paid, we do not know that,” Özgür said.

And now, of course, you have the sight of Devlet Bahçeli, head of the government’s minority coalition partner, the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), calling the famous mob boss Alaatin Çakıcı “my friend” and a “comrade”. Turkey’s government was always suspected of using mafia-like organisations to do some of its dirty work, but rarely have senior government figures openly called crime bosses their friends.

These open signs of corruption are the mark of a government in decline, whose creation of patronage networks to maintain power has led to corrupt practices that are increasingly hard to hide. Turkey dropped from 78th to 91st in Transparency International’s Corruption 

Perceptions Index report for 2020.

source: tradingeconomics.com

Turkey cannot be seen as a country to safely invest in when the perception of the state’s corruption is getting worse. The Turkish public also loses trust in the government when they perceive big construction projects as a way to launder public money to friends of the state, often for projects like the failed Ankapark theme park, which recently closed after costing $750 million.

As in the UK, Turkey’s problems with corruption are an indication of a government that has been in power too long, that has become used to the trappings of power and the patronage that government confers. Erdoğan relies on these patronage networks of powerful corporate figures to support his party, which makes any serious attempt at tackling corruption in the construction industry difficult for him to achieve.

French philosopher Camus once said: “The slave begins by demanding justice and ends by wanting to wear a crown.” In the case of the AKP, which has long claimed to be the champion of ordinary, poor, conservative Anatolians, the slave may still occasionally pretend to care about economic justice, but its real priority seems to be building a large c