Turkish prosecutors have ordered the detention of 25 more suspects as part of a corruption investigation into festival tenders organized by ANSET, a company owned by the opposition-run Antalya Metropolitan Municipality, the Anka news agency reported on Wednesday.
The Antalya Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office had previously issued detention warrants on April 30 for 34 people, including employees of the municipality, run by the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), and companies involved in organizing festivals.
Twenty-seven people were detained in the first wave of operations and 14 of them were later arrested.
The investigation concerns allegations of bid-rigging, the securing of unlawful benefits and the laundering of proceeds allegedly obtained through public tenders.
Prosecutors claim the alleged irregularities caused public losses totaling 113.4 million Turkish lira ($2.5 million).
Antalya Mayor Muhittin Böcek, who is in pretrial detention in a separate case, and former deputy secretary-general Durmuş Ali Arslan are among the suspects in the investigation.
Böcek, who in 2024 was re-elected mayor of Antalya, a major Mediterranean city and tourism hub, was first arrested in July 2025 in a bribery investigation and later suspended from office.
A court issued another arrest order for him in April in the separate corruption case tied to ANSET.
The Antalya operations are part of a broader campaign against CHP-run municipalities that began in late 2024 and intensified after the March 2025 jailing of İstanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s main political rival.
Recent tallies in Turkish media say 23 CHP mayors have been jailed at some point since the March 31, 2024, local elections, 20 remain in jail and 25 have been removed from office.
CHP officials say the cases are politically motivated and are being used to roll back the party’s strong gains in the 2024 local elections, when it finished first nationwide in a vote for the first time since 1977 and won many of Turkey’s biggest cities.