Grand theft coup: Real estate fortune revealed

ANKARA

A report says ex-President Evren owns a huge amount of property.

Turkey’s Financial Crimes Investigative Board (MASAK) issued a report which revealed that the leaders of the 1980 coup own large amounts of real estate property.

Parliament’s coup inquiry commission formally asked MASAK for data on the financial and real estate activities of the five coup leaders and their families.

According to MASAK’s detailed report to Parliament, the family of coup leader Kenan Evren holds large expanses of property, while Tahsin Şahinkaya’s family owns 90 duplex residences in the northwestern province of Yalova alone.

Parliament sent a copy of this report to Ankara’s 12th Court for Serious Crimes, which is now hearing the 1980 military coup case. The court made an interlocutory decision in the last hearing of the case allowing lawyers to examine the report, though they could not obtain a copy of it. According to intervening lawyers, the MASAK report revealed that the coup leaders have extraordinary amounts of real estate property, daily Radikal reported yesterday.

According to the lawyers’ investigation, Evren’s son-in-law Maksut Süleyman Göksu owns three masonry buildings in Ankara’s Çankaya district as well as land in Erzurum, Ankara, Hatay, İskenderun and Marmaris. Evren’s other son-in-law, Erkan Gürvit, also owns a masonry residence and land in Istanbul’s Sarıyer district along with a residence in Şişli.

Şahinkaya’s son Serdar Şahinkaya was revealed to own an apartment in Istanbul’s Kadıköy district and his son-in-law Mustafa Cemil Kartal owns a factory, 90 duplex buildings in Yalova, three workplaces and a cafeteria.

The daughter-in-law of former commander of the Turkish Gendarmerie Forces Sedat Celasun, Füsun Celasun, was said to own five-floor buildings with 224 apartments in Ankara, but she defined the report yesterday as “imaginative.”

Celasun told the Hürriyet daily that the 224 apartments that were mentioned in the report were the army housing that was built during the time her father-in-law was in office.

“Everything that is written is imaginative. I have an apartment that I bought together with my husband, who is a retired colonel, in Ümitköy, and we live there. Besides this, there is a 1997 model car registered to the property of my husband. Except these, we don’t have any other property or possessions. I still work at a public office even though my retirement date has come. Would I still work if I really had 224 apartments like the report states?” Füsun Celasun said.

‘Report is incomplete’

One of the intervening lawyers, Öztürk Türkdoğan, said the report was incomplete. “There is no information about the period before 1997. The data on properties must be issued beginning from 1977, the pre-coup period, so that their manner of acquiring property can be highlighted. However, even in this report, it can be seen that the coup leaders and their families own great amounts of property.”