A former mayor from the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) who replaced a democratically elected district mayor in Turkey’s predominantly Kurdish southeast in 2019 has been arrested on bribery charges, the private DHA news agency reported.
A Diyarbakır court ruled for the arrest of Hüseyin Beyoğlu, who was appointed mayor of the Bağlar district of Diyarbakır by the Supreme Election Board in 2019 despite the fact that he lost the election to Zeyyat Ceylan, the candidate from the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP).
Although Ceylan received 70 percent of the vote in the March 2019 local elections against Beyoğlu, who received only 25 percent, he was not allowed to take office since he had been expelled from public service by a government decree following a coup attempt in July 2016. Some 130,000 public servants were purged from their jobs under the pretext of an anti-coup fight through such controversial decrees, which were not subjected to judicial review.
Beyoğlu was detained last year as part of a bribery investigation carried out by the Diyarbakır Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office but was released from custody pending trial. He also faced accusations of causing financial loss to the municipality by incurring a huge debt.
An indictment drafted against Beyoğlu and two other municipal officials seeks a prison sentence from five to 10 years under Article 250 of the Turkish Penal Code (TCK), which concerns crimes involving bribery.
They are accused of seeking TL 5 million in bribes from businessman Nusret Bekirhanlı in return for granting him a building permit. An investigation was launched after criminal complaints were filed by Bekirhanlı against Beyoğlu and the two other municipal officials.
Although Beyoğlu was initially not in pretrial detention, the Diyarbakır 10th High Criminal Court ruled for his arrest during the trial’s second hearing on Wednesday, stating that he was a flight risk.
Beyoğlu turned himself in at the Diyarbakır Courthouse and was subsequently jailed.
It is rare for AKP mayors or officials to face prosecution or arrest in Turkey despite widespread allegations of bribery and corruption.
According to the 2023 Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) released by Transparency International in January, Turkey took 14 steps back and was ranked 115th among 180 countries with a score of 34 out of 100, the lowest in the past 10 years.
The CPI ranks countries and territories based on how corrupt their public sector is perceived to be. A country or territory’s score indicates the perceived level of public sector corruption on a scale of 0 (highly corrupt) to 100 (very clean).
According to the index Turkey, which was ranked 101st in 2022 with a score of 36, has lost two points and was ranked the same as Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Malawi, Philippines and Ecuador in 2023.
Transparency International’s study can be considered proof that Turkey’s backsliding started in late 2013, when Turkey was shaken by two corruption investigations implicating then-prime minister and current president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s inner circle.
Erdoğan’s government subsequently suppressed the corruption scandal by managing to control the judiciary by creating special criminal courts headed by a single judge, thanks to the AKP’s parliamentary majority.
These judges then jailed all the police and prosecutors who had conducted the 2013 corruption investigations, while Erdoğan and his family members who were implicated have never appeared in court.