Turkcell Ad Policy May Face US Courts

A decision by Turkey's largest mobile GSM operator, Turkcell, to radically reduce its advertising in newspapers critical of the government may be brought to trial in a court abroad, probably in the US, Turkish media speculated on Monday.

Turkcell is the only Turkish company listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), and it has shareholders who live in the US or are US citizens. Sözcü, one of the Turkish dailies that increased its anti-government coverage after corruption scandals went public last year, reported on Monday that shareholders in the US might opt to sue the company's board for abuse of power. Sözcü, which has seen a 89.8 percent decline in the amount of advertising it receives from Turkcell -- from 10,014 column-centimeters between January and September 2013 to 1,025 in the same period of this year -- criticized Turkcell for changing its advertising strategy in favor of pro-government media outlets while decreasing advertising for media outlets critical of the government.

Recent data on advertising distribution of companies by Nielsen, a leading global information and measurement company, shows that Turkcell radically reduced its advertising in newspapers known to have adopted a critical stance against the government after the corruption scandals that became public on Dec. 17 and Dec. 25, 2013, implicating members of the government and the business world. Nielsen's advertising expenditure (AdEx) report revealed that Turkcell has dramatically increased the amount of advertisements it has in pro-government newspapers such as Yeni Akit, a radical Islamist Turkish daily.

Sözcü quoted a number of experts -- whom it cited as former Capital Markets Board (SPK) members -- as saying Turkcell shareholders could discuss Turkcell's unjust ad policy with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Turkcell allocated 5.8 percent of its ads to the top three best-selling dailies -- Zaman, Posta and Hürriyet -- in the first nine months of this year, while three dailies that belong to a close ally of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Ethem Sancak, received 30.3 percent from the cake.

(Cihan/Today's Zaman)