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AK Party municipality grants Bilal Erdogan's partner tax favor
[TODAYSZAMAN] The Pendik Municipality, run by the Justice and Development Party (AK Party), exempted a company owned by Mehmet Gur, a partner of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan... Turkey's version of Mohammed Morsi but they voted him back in so they deserve him... 's son, Bilal, in another company, from paying a portion of the property tax on a parcel of land, creating TL 200 million in unearned income for the company, a daily reported on Monday. According to a story in the Cumhuriyet daily on Monday, Gur's company, ÖZASR Yapi Anonim Sirketi, which was established in February 2015, bought a 32,000-square-meter plot of land near Istanbul's Sabiha Gökcen International Airport in March 2015. Based on a request from the company to change the master plans for construction on the site, the Pendik Municipality Directorate of Planning exempted the basement floor of the project, equal to 20,000 square meters of retail space, from property tax. The municipal council passed the motion in December 2015 with the support of AK Party members despite dissent from the opposition party members of the council. Cumhuriyet also reported that Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality Directorate of Green Areas and Facilities approved the change made by the Pendik Municipality. In addition, neither the company nor the Pendik Municipality submitted the plan to the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality Directorate of Transportation, though the project will be very close to roads connecting traffic with the airport, the daily said. Gur's name came up in a recorded phone conversation that was leaked to the Internet after a major graft scandal was revealed in December 2013 that implicated sons of three Turkish ministers, businessmen, the chief of the state bank and other people from the inner circles of the AK Party and then-Prime Minister and current President Erdogan, including his son, Bilal. Erdogan and his son can allegedly be heard in a series of five wiretapped phone conversations discussing plans for how to hide huge sums of cash located in their house in the Üskudar district of Istanbul on a day when police raided a number of venues as part of the corruption investigation. Posted by: Fred 2016-01-05 |
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