Erdoğan donates compensation from lawsuit to students

ANKARA

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has donated the money he gained from a lawsuit against the main opposition leader to students as scholarship, the president’s lawyer has said.

Lawyer Hüseyin Aydın said they lodged a lawsuit against Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, the leader of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), for a speech he delivered at his party’s parliamentary group meeting back in February 2018.

In this speech, Kılıçdaroğlu made statements which amounted to defamation and a legal action was taken, Aydın said.

A civil court of first instance in Ankara, which handled the case, ordered Kılıçdaroğlu to pay a total of 43,300 Turkish liras (around $4,500) to Erdoğan in compensation.

After a district court in Ankara rejected an appeal against the ruling, the money was collected from Kılıçdaroğlu.

The money from the compensation case has been donated to the Recep Tayyip Erdoğan University Development Fund to be distributed among students as scholarship.