Former Minister To Earn A Fast TL 74 Million From Real Estate Project

A company run by former Environment and Urban Planning Minister Erdoğan Bayraktar -- who resigned after being implicated in corruption allegations that surfaced in December 2013 -- and his family is slated to earn TL 74 million in profit from a real estate project built on land he purchased two years ago, according to a report in the Hürriyet daily on Friday.

Bayraktar's family company purchased the land -- a 10,000-square-meter parcel located in İstanbul's Anatolian quarter of Koşuyolu -- for TL 42 million. Construction on the Koşuyolu Elysium Elit residential project has commanded serious interest and is expected to be completed by 2016. Units in the luxury residential complex went up for sale on Thursday, reportedly commanding prices starting at $4,300 per square meter.

The construction company overseeing the project, Ofton İnşaat, will earn 45 percent of the revenue from sales of units on the land, while the owner of the land, Bayraktar's family firm Bayraktar İnşaat, will get the remaining 55 percent, according to Ofton İnşaat Co-Chair İsmail Hakkı Altun, who spoke to Hürriyet.

Moreover, Bayraktar has benefited heavily from having licensed the construction project as an urban transformation project on the basis that the single building originally found on the land was risk-prone. Such licensing allowed the former minister to benefit from a 1 percent tax instead of the normal 18 percent rate, according to the report.

Bayraktar had confirmed the purchase of the Koşuyolu land in statements to Hürriyet in July of last year. “The company that I founded in 1994 and later left to my children purchased the land in Koşuyolu and has business there. It is very reasonable and innocent. There is no misconduct regarding taxes or insurance. It is not secret or hidden. The company is mine and I own 7 percent of the shares. Essentially I founded it, and I made it grow. However, in the past 20 years my children have carried it along. When I entered the bureaucracy the company didn't grow very much. However, it has material wealth of TL 70-80 million, maybe TL 100 million, maybe more,” said Bayraktar.

Bayraktar has consistently appeared in the press over the past year due to his alleged involvement in various scandals and participation in bribery. Immediately following the major corruption allegations that went public on Dec. 17, 2013, Bayraktar publicly lashed out at then-Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, saying that Erdoğan should step down as he was the mastermind behind the corrupt dealings. He later recanted his statement, saying he was caught up in the moment. During his tenure as head of the Housing Development Administration of Turkey (TOKİ) in 2012, Bayraktar admitted to fraudulently awarding millions in contracts to one construction company.

(Cihan/Today's Zaman)