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The prosecutors claimed Zarrab handed out around $60 million in bribes. Zarrab allegedly gave $5 million to (then) Interior Minister Muammer Guler in return for Turkish citizenship. Zarrab also allegedly paid $5 million to (then) Economy Minister Zafer Caglayan's son, Salih Kaan, and gave a $300,000 Patek Philip Swiss watch to the minister.
Meanwhile, the police found around $9 million in cash stuffed into shoe boxes at the home of Suleyman Arslan, then general manager of Halkbank, a government-owned bank that was instrumental in trade between Turkey and Iran (shoe boxes would later become a symbol of corruption at anti-government protests across Turkey). EU Minister Egemen Bagis was the other recipient of cash from Zarrab, according to the prosecutors. And Housing Minister Erdogan Bayraktar was accused of arranging multibillion dollar contracts for government-friendly companies.
From the start of the investigation, Erdogan seemed to fear that the allegations now in the public domain could finish him off at the ballot box in municipal and presidential elections in March and August 2014, respectively. He claimed that an influential Muslim preacher, Fethullah Gulen, and his network of prosecutors and police officers were behind the investigations. He and his closest political associates, including Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu claim the same thing to this day. Gulen, who lives in self-exile in the United States, was Erdogan's most powerful political ally until the two were engaged in a power struggle early in 2014.
There is speculation in Ankara that the next target of Erdogan's "witch hunt" will likely be prosecutors and judges believed to be members of Gulen's movement.
All the same, the big blow to the Gulenists did not come from Erdogan's counter-offensive, but from the ballot box. Erdogan's Justice and Development Party AKP won 43.3 percent of the vote in municipal elections last March, and Erdogan won 51.5 percent of the vote in presidential elections in August.
That thinking, coupled with a move to reshuffle the top layers of the judiciary, changed the balance of power in favor of Erdogan.
In October, a prosecutor in Istanbul dropped all charges against the suspects in the corruption investigation. The cash confiscated from them was returned, with interest! But there was another investigation not yet closed.
Turkey is once again heading for elections. The parliamentary elections in June will be particularly critical for Erdogan, for a number of reasons. First, someone other than him (Davutoglu) will be leading the party's campaign for the first time since 2002. Second, Erdogan's ambitions are not about just winning the elections. He seems interested in securing a two-thirds majority, so that the constitution can be amended to legitimize his present effective executive presidency. Erdogan calculates that any publicity about his former ministers standing trial, and evidence against them hitting headlines, could prune his party's votes in June. He is probably right. If he wants to change the constitution in favor of a lawfully executive presidential system, he cannot afford to lose even a handful of votes.
The opposition is furious. So is the anti-Erdogan bloc, which makes up roughly half of Turkey. There will be a final round of voting at the parliament's general assembly at the end of January. The vote will be about whether to send the corruption suspects to the Constitutional Court or not. The AKP has enough of a majority to kill the move. But the opposition relies on "secret voting," which can produce defectors from the AKP benches. The opposition will need about 55 defectors from the government to send the former ministers to the Constitutional Court. This looks unlikely, but not altogether impossible.
Once again, Turkey has proven to be a fascinating country, putting rules of law and ethics upside down. In Turkey, corruption suspects have a shield against prosecution, and law enforcement officers who prosecute corruption can go to jail.
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