Murat Uysal, Turkey’s new central bank governor, became a controversial subject on social media after a Turkish economist on Twitter exposed plagiarism in Uysal’s master’s 2001 thesis.
According to Can Okar, Uysal’s thesis copied some paragraphs from scientific articles titled “Inflation Targeting in Emerging Market Countries” by Frederic S. Mishkin (2000), “Inflation Targeting in Developing Countries” by Kadıoğlu et al (2000), and “How Did They Manage the Floating Crisis?” by Melike Altınkemer (2001).
Despite copying a number of paragraphs from these articles, Uysal’s thesis, titled “Enflasyon Hedeflemesi: Dünya’da ve Türkiye’deki Uygulamaları” (Inflation Targeting: Practices in the world and Turkey), failed to include footnotes directly attributing the aforementioned studies.
While Uysal included the first two articles in the bibliography of the thesis, he did not even mention Altınkemer’s work, Okar tweeted.
Meanwhile, Professor Erişah Arıcan, the supervisor of Uysal’s thesis, attracted attention in December 2016 when Wikileaks released e-mails allegedly belonging to then-Energy Minister Berat Albayrak. In an e-mail dated Sept. 27, 2010, Arıcan tells Albayrak she has finished most of his Ph.D. thesis, asks him to fill in some missing parts and proposes they write the conclusion together.
After Albayrak became treasury and finance minister in July 2018, Arıcan was assigned to the board of country’s Wealth Fund by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
Uysal was appointed the new central bank governor after his predecessor, Murat Çetinkaya, was fired by President Erdoğan over his refusal to decrease interest rates.