‘Erdogan was target in bribery inquiry’

Bloomberg

Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan was among the targets of a bribery and money laundering probe in that country related to
illicit flows of Iranian oil proceeds,
a former Istanbul police officer
testified in New York.
The officer, Huseyin Korkmaz, said the investigation initially focused on the organization run by gold trader Reza Zarrab, but later grew to include dozens of others. He called Erdogan the “number one” target in a group that also included Mehmet Zafer Caglayan, the former economy minister, and Suleyman Aslan, ex-chief executive of Turkiye Bank Halkasi AS, a large Turkish state-owned bank, which was central to the scheme.
Korkmaz — a boyish 30-year-old in eyeglasses and a button-down sweater under his suit — described a harrowing ordeal in which he was reassigned from the case within days of a 2013 raid and ultimately jailed. He said he fled the country and took with him a cache of the investigative materials, which he eventually turned over to US authorities.
“I left the country I dearly loved,” he said tearfully. The testimony of Korkmaz, who was head of the investigative team, confirms for the first time that the corruption case in Turkey was aimed directly at Erdogan — not just his ministers, associates and family members. It may help explain why Erdogan responded so forcefully to it, as well as the Turkish government’s angry response to the probe being re-opened in the US Erdogan called the Turkish investigation a coup plot that sought to remove his government from power, and he purged prosecutors and judges from the judiciary. The Turkish investigation ended after Zarrab’s December 2013 arrest in Turkey and a raid on the home of Aslan, which recovered millions of dollars in cash stuffed into shoe boxes. Photos of the cash recovered from the raid were shown to the jury in Manhattan federal court.
As the US ratcheted up financial sanctions on Iran in retaliation for its effort to build a nuclear weapon, Iran was increasingly unable to access billions of dollars piling up in overseas banks from oil sales to foreign countries. Prosecutors allege Zarrab, with the aid of Turkish officials and bank executives, ran a laundering scheme to get around the sanctions and use Iran’s money to make international payments on its behalf, including $1 billion that flowed through New York banks.
Zarrab pleaded guilty shortly before the US trial and spent seven days on the witness stand testifying against Halkbank executive Mehmet Hakan Atilla, now the lone defendant in the case. Nine people have been indicted, including Aslan
and Caglayan. All but Atilla and Zarrab have avoided US arrest.
Erdogan isn’t charged.
In his earlier testimony, Zarrab said he was told that Erdogan personally ordered that two Tur-
kish banks be cut in on the laundering scheme, and that the prime minister ordered the resumption of the plot after the investigation was quashed. Erdogan was prime minister until late August 2014, when he became president.
Notably, little of the testimony from Korkmaz involved Atilla; instead, it focused on how the Turkish investigation came to be shut down. Prosecutors also showed jurors surveillance photographs in which Korkmaz said bribery payments were being made, including one depicting a man identified as Zarrab’s courier outside the office of a charitable foundation founded by Erdogan.