 from Turkey’s state housing agency has been awarded to a company co-owned by Burak Soylu, a businessman who as a child exchanged letters with President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan during his imprisonment in 1999, according to a report by the BirGün daily.){kind=link}
A construction tender worth nearly 700 million Turkish lira ($17 million) from Turkey’s state housing agency has been awarded to a company co-owned by Burak Soylu, a businessman who as a child exchanged letters with President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan during his imprisonment in 1999, according to a report by the BirGün daily.
The Housing Development Administration (TOKİ) signed a contract on March 14 with the joint venture Har Proje Yapı and Vyn İnşaat for the construction of 281 housing units in the eastern province of Tunceli, including related infrastructure and landscaping work.
The tender, held on February 20, was conducted under Article 21/B of Turkey’s Public Procurement Law, a “negotiated procedure” intended for emergencies such as natural disasters or projects requiring specialized techniques. Critics say the provision has long been abused to bypass competitive bidding and award contracts to companies with close ties to the government.
Soylu, the owner of Har Proje Yapı, made headlines in 2019 when Turkish media reported that he had met Erdoğan years after the president replied to a letter Soylu wrote to him as an 11-year-old while Erdoğan was serving a prison sentence in 1999.
At the time, Soylu showed Erdoğan the handwritten letter he had received in response, in which Erdoğan wrote: “Dear brother, thank you for the sentiments in your letter. I send you heartfelt greetings from Pınarhisar Prison, where we are preparing to continue our service where we left off.”
Erdoğan, who gained national prominence after his election as mayor of İstanbul from the now-defunct Welfare Party (RP) in 1994, was forced out of office in 1998 and prohibited from participating in politics following a conviction in for “inciting hatred” after publicly reciting a poem, for which he also served four months at Pınarhisar Prison in the northwestern province of Kırklareli.
His political ban was later lifted, paving the way for him to found the Justice and Development Party (AKP) in 2001 and become prime minister in 2003, marking the beginning of his more than two-decades-long dominance of Turkish politics.
Soylu, now a lawyer and businessman, has since accompanied Erdoğan on several overseas trips, and some state-owned banks and Turkcell, a major telecommunications company, are reported to be among his clients.
In a statement to BirGün, Soylu said he had taken part in the TOKİ tender on behalf of another company that did not meet participation criteria and that his firm was not directly carrying out the project.
Public procurement under scrutiny
Turkey’s use of Article 21/B tenders has long attracted criticism from opposition lawmakers and transparency watchdogs, who argue that it allows the government to steer lucrative contracts to pro-government companies.
The latest award adds to a series of multimillion-lira projects granted to businesspeople seen as close to the ruling AKP, reinforcing concerns about favoritism and a lack of oversight of public spending.