Erdogan’s ex-confidant Bayraktar: Will he speak?
Erdogan Bayraktar, Turkey’s proverbial “contractor-in-chief” for a decade, who resigned from his post in the government after his son was briefly detained on corruption charges, and called on PM Erdogan to follow suit, is seen as the “black box” of government’s mostly unaudited business.
The two men certainly share more than a name. In fact, Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the ex-member of his government Erdogan Bayraktar considered each other comrades and confidants for a couple of decades.
They seem to have much in common:
Both hail from the coastal towns of the Black Sea and both are self-declared “lovers of Istanbul.” Both are conservative and take pride in their piety. Both are passionate about mortar and cement, so much so that, working in tandem, they turned Turkey into one gigantic building site.
Their construction crusade started in 1994 when Erdogan — then the recently elected mayor of Istanbul — decided to restructure an inactive municipal company as a major residential development venture called Kiptas under Bayraktar’s management. In the four years that followed, the latter oversaw the building of 17,000 residential units in Istanbul and, through their sale, provided a substantial income to the municipality.
