A Turkish prosecutor requested this Tuesday 2,352 years in prison for the mayor of Istanbul, Ekrem İmamoğluthe president’s main political adversary Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Yes, you read correctly. No less than 2,352 years in prison for the 142 crimes that the Turkish Justice accuses him of. The equivalent of a few life sentences.
İmamoğlu has been held since last March in Marmara Prison, on the outskirts of Istanbul, where he lives under a severe isolation regime. His arrest caused a national scandal in Türkiye. The country was shaken by the largest wave of street protests since 2013. Protests that, however, failed to reverse the situation.
The Istanbul councilor is accused of fraud, bribery, bribery, money laundering and bid rigging, according to the charge sheet, which accumulates more than 3,700 pages. He remains buried under an avalanche of crimes that he denies having committed. Both the Turkish opposition and human rights organizations denounce a judicial persecution with obvious political motivations against the mayor of the country’s largest city.
The most recent procedure accuses him of espionage within the framework of the campaign that raised him to the Mayor’s Office of Istanbul in 2019, after a repeat election. But the most serious criminal accusation places him at the top of a criminal organization that made up another 402 people (of which 105 are also detained), according to the Istanbul prosecutor general, Akin Gürlek.
It is Gürlek himself who describes the plot as an “octopus” that caused the State to lose around 160,000 million Turkish liras (about 3,300 million euros) in the last ten years. The prosecutor says he is convinced that İmamoğlu used the organization to “take control” of the opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP, social democrat) and “generate funds for his presidential candidacy.”
The Turkish courts sought, in any case, to prevent İmamoğlu from running for office by invalidating his university degree in March, an essential requirement to assume the head of state, according to Turkish electoral law. The leader of his party, Özgür Özeldenounces “a flagrant case of judicial interference in politics” that aims to “keep our candidate in prison.”
“This act of accusation will have broader consequences, in addition to the obvious fact that it seeks to eliminate İmamoğlu from politics,” predicts the analyst. Arife Köse. “It will likely be used to open a case seeking to shut down the main opposition party, the CHP. It is also likely to be used to further restrict the electoral activities – including financial ones – of political parties.”