ANKARA, 13 May 2006 — Turkey’s former Islamist Prime Minister Necemettin Erbakan will go on trial next month for a second time on charges of embezzling funds from a now-defunct party he used to lead, the Anatolia news agency reported yesterday. The 79-year-old veteran politician was initially sentenced in 2002 to two years and four months in jail for falsifying documents to cover up the misuse of state funds granted to his Welfare Party.
Erbakan managed to postpone the execution of his sentence four times, with the last postponement expiring in January 2006. An appeal by his lawyers for Erbakan to be judged under the new penal code that came into force last year was accepted by the appeals court, which also overturned the 2002 conviction.
An Ankara court will begin retrying Erbakan on June 7, the agency said. Erbakan served as Turkey’s first Islamist prime minister for a tumultuous year until June 1997 when the army, self-declared guardians of this Muslim nation’s strictly secular system, forced him to resign.
In January 1998, the Constitutional Court outlawed his Welfare Party for undermining the secular order and banned him from politics for five years. In line with Turkish law, party assets were transferred to the treasury, which found that about $3.6 million were missing.
The party argued that it had transferred the money to its provincial branches, but the court said the party had forged 139 documents to embezzle the funds and that the money never reached provincial offices.
In a separate damages trial launched by the treasury against Erbakan and other party officials, experts said in January that the total loss had grown to about $8.1 million with interest.
Earlier this year, the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who was an aide to Erbakan before disavowing his openly Islamist views for a more classically conservative tone, enacted a law in Parliament that could save the former premier from going behind bars if he is sentenced again.
