ANKARA, 17 February 2005 — Former Turkish Prime Minister Mesut Yilmaz yesterday became the highest-ranking Turkish official to be put on trial for corruption when the Supreme Court began hearing charges of tender fixing in a 1998 bank privatization.
Yilmaz and his Deputy Prime Minister Gunes Taner are accused of rigging the tender for state-run Turkbank. If convicted, they face a minimum 10-year prison sentence. The scandal led to the collapse of the Yilmaz government in 1998.
The $600 million tender for a majority stake in the bank was canceled after allegations of underworld involvement in fixing the result. Turkbank was subsequently taken into state receivership.
Yilmaz, who also served as a deputy prime minister in the previous government, denied any wrongdoing at his trial’s first hearing. “As prime minister, I did not have the slightest interference or involvement in this tender process,” Yilmaz was quoted as saying by the state-run Anatolian news agency.
“To say that I was involved in corruption in a tender that had nothing to do with me is a departure from intelligence, conscience and the law,” he said. Yilmaz, 58, is accused of seeking out organized criminals to threaten bidders in the Turkbank sale to ensure a favored bidder won the tender.
In the hearing, followed by a media throng and several supporters of the defendants, the defense lawyers presented to the 11-judge panel their arguments on what they saw as procedural mistakes in the trial.
Yilmaz’s lawyer, Ugur Alacakaptan, argued that the case should be thrown out on the grounds that the parliamentary investigation commission which recommended lawmakers to send his client to court had breached procedural laws. “The commission worked like a private detective and violated the principle of the presumption of innocence,” Alacakaptan told the hearing. “The commission went beyond its authority and the procedural rules it should follow,” he added. He also argued that the decision to try Yilmaz was based on political and not judicial motives.
