Özgür Özel reacts to the seizure order on Ziraat Bank accounts: 'At the request of a crony company'

CHP Chairman Özel made the following statements in his address:

Truly, today, while Republican People's Party municipalities are struggling so much economically, and while they are trying to—in the words of the President—'shake them down' and leave them with no capacity to provide services, and while our Metropolitan Mayor and many of our bureaucrat friends are unfortunately under arrest, they are working day and night without stopping to ensure that services are not disrupted, just as they wanted.

Today, it is no joke to have reached the test drive stage on such a metro line. In 2018, the AK Party government, using the financial crisis of that period as an excuse—and unfortunately, they were having great difficulty finding money from abroad—had stopped these constructions or had been unable to start them.

Let us not forget that the Minister of Transport (Adil Karaismailoğlu) was the Deputy Secretary General responsible for metros and rail systems at that time. I told him during the budget negotiations that they were the ones who stopped these metros, and that we had started them by finding very important resources from abroad and with the right projects, and this was recorded in the parliamentary minutes.

The money that the İBB brought in from abroad for a specific, designated project is sitting in a certain account. And that is a non-seizable account. Because we received it and used that money for this purpose.

There is a payment due at the end of the year. We are going to make the payment from that account so that neither we nor anyone else in Turkey will be told, 'You asked for credit, yet you are not paying your debts to the world.'

Therefore, those accounts are, according to the law, non-seizable accounts. But a seizure was placed on our money in that account by Ziraat Bank, on our non-seizable account, by a crony company, and they took that money. In fact, the money they took, the money the crony company seized, the money they did as an act of malice toward Istanbul, is a seizure process that damages Turkey's reputation abroad. We would like to remind everyone of this.