Spotlight on AK Party gov't corruption widens after scandal

But a police raid this week targeting the families of three government ministers and select members of Turkey's business elite seemed to reenergize Turkey's harried opposition press and fueled public curiosity over the depth of alleged foul play in Turkey's state-managed construction sector.

“I think that now that this has begun, this inquiry against the government has grabbed public attention and can't really be stopped,” said opposition Republican People's Party (CHP) deputy Aykut Erdoğdu, who last year leveled his own corruption charges against the government. “I think people knew this was happening. But now that it's out in the open, you can't roll it back into the dark.”

On Tuesday morning, police detained the sons of three Cabinet ministers, the mayor of İstanbul's staunchly conservative Fatih district and a total of 48 other suspects in what police said was a year-long investigation into government corruption. Pictures of police discovering what they say was $4.5 million in cash stuffed into shoe boxes, allegedly found in the home of state-owned Halkbank's chief executive, provided the dramatic touch to fuel outrage on social media and among the wider public.

But for the CHP's Erdoğdu, though the raid was a landmark moment, it was also a disappointing one: In late 2012, the deputy brought forward detailed allegations against the former head of the government's bloated public housing authority, the Housing Development Administration of Turkey (TOKİ), and called for a police investigation.

The minister Erdoğdu implicated, Erdoğan Bayraktar -- whose son was taken into police custody during Tuesday's raids -- later appeared before Parliament, openly acknowledging that one group TOKİ had partnered with, KC Group, had “extorted TL 55 million [$30.6 billion]” from TOKİ through a set of phony tenders. “I was weak, we should have seen as administrators what was going on. … Whoever is guilty, they should be punished, me included,” the minister told Parliament. But what happened next, said Erdoğdu, revealed just how broken Turkey's system of rooting out government foul play is: The minister later claimed he had championed an internal TOKİ-wide investigation into corruption, Erdoğdu's requests for an official investigation were ignored and no members of KC Group were ever brought to court.

“The problems with corruption have never been about one minister, or a group of ministers. It is about an institutional problem of transparency,” said retired economics professor and newspaper columnist Eser Karakaş. Turkey reformed its public procurement laws -- which govern public-private building contracts -- in 2002, when then-Minister of Economic Affairs Kemal Derviş drafted transparency regulations along the lines of those in the EU. But, says Karakaş, ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) lawmakers have since watered down the once-robust laws “over 20 times.”

Government officials bent on construction projects are able to override those safeguards that do remain, suggested a report published this week in the Radikal daily. The opposition daily cited police reports that the now-detained mayor of Fatih, Mustafa Demir, had allegedly intimidated other municipal officials into agreeing to rezone archeological sites in the ancient city to allow construction projects to be built atop them. And when Japanese engineers working on the undersea Marmaray subway line objected to a proposed hotel project on top of the tunnel -- a project they said would jeopardize the structural integrity of the tunnel near its exit in Fatih -- the mayor reportedly overruled them.

While much coverage in Turkey's rumor-bent press remains hearsay, there is little question that the court system meant to challenge building projects is woefully underpowered, says İstanbul University professor and urban planner Pelin Özden. The plans for major government construction projects don't usually go through a public vetting process before construction begins, and legal challenges to some of İstanbul's most controversial projects often begin only after the project is halfway finished. “These projects are brought to life in haste and with secrecy. Only later can someone get evidence and challenge the project in court,” Özden said. The situation is only likely to worsen after this year's wave of anti-government unrest, which saw Ankara strip oversight powers on state building projects from the Turkish Union of Engineers and Architects' Chambers (TMMOB), a civil society group that frequently opposes government projects through legal challenges.

Creating a more transparent approach to public building projects is also about the sheer scale of the government's ambitions, Erdoğdu says. Citing mega-projects including İstanbul's under-construction third bridge over the Bosporus, a third airport also planned for the city and a massive canal project slated to be built to the city's west, Erdoğdu says, “The scale of projects means there simply isn't a way to challenge them or track how transparent the projects are.”

Turkey's financing woes may make some of those mega-projects impracticable, and the current corruption probe may eventually find businessmen and government ministers guilty of misappropriating government funds. But solving the transparency problems in the public-private network of construction firms and government ministers will take robust legislation and dogged implementation of the law, Erdoğdu said. “You have to solve the problem at the root.”