Istanbul parking income exceed budgets of 52 cities

ANKARA - Anatolia News Agency

ISPARK, the municipality’s car park operator in Istanbul, provides services at 500 parking points and has 15 million liras in monthly turnover, it has said. DAILY NEWS photo / Emrah GÜREL

Istanbul municipality’s parking lot operator, İSPARK, has a turnover higher than the budget of 52 provincial municipalities, a Finance Ministry inventory study has shown.

The report identified more than 300 municipal companies operating throughout the country in areas such as car park management, food provision and energy, whose financial earnings outranked the budgets of most provincial municipalities.

Total subsidies for the municipality of Istanbul equated to around one fifth of the total budget of all Turkish municipalities.

ISPARK and municipal bread seller tops

The turnover of ISPARK was revealed to be larger than the budget income for 52 provincial municipalities, while Ankara Halk Ekmek, another municipality-owned firm that has been producing and selling bread, saw a turnover higher than the budgets of 33 provinces.

The Finance Ministry has completed the study it had been conducting to gather financial information on local governments to improve transparency by categorizing companies based on their field of operations and numbers.

“Municipal companies’ bank holdings, assets and debts will be available for public consultation,” Turkish Finance Minister Mehmet Şimşek said.

Organizing the financial information of the municipal companies will be the latest step by the government to clarify public institutions’ accounts and make them more transparent, the minister said.
The comparisons with foreign countries’ institutions will also get easier as this data becomes more visible.

The ministry and municipalities also developed software in order to make the transfer of financial data more sustainable, as they will send the figures on a tri-monthly basis.

ISPARK’s daily turnover is 500,000 Turkish Liras, while its monthly turnover is around 15 million liras, according to figures provided by the Istanbul parking operator last December.

Located at 500 parking points in Istanbul, including on-road parking, ISPARK undertakes 100,000 parking transactions a day, earning 40 million liras a year.

The earnings have put around 1 billion liras in the state’s cash box over seven years, according to the same data.