TM Editorial
On Wednesday, December 17, Ali Mahir Başarır, a deputy chair of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), posted a blunt reminder of what many Turks still call “the week of theft and corruption.”
He was referring to 12 years ago — December 17, 2013, when Turkish police launched predawn raids in İstanbul that shook the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and the government led by then-prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Prosecutors detained dozens of people, including the sons of three ministers, senior public officials and high-profile business figures seen as close to the government.
Safes and stacks of cash were found in ministers’ homes, and shoeboxes filled with dollars appeared in police evidence photos.
The 2013 raids were the result of an anti-corruption investigation into bribery, tender rigging and influence trading in a construction-driven economy, where government permits and public contracts can make or break fortunes.
The imagery that still burns in the public memory and that Başarır was invoking today were photos showing open safes stacked with banknotes in the home of a minister’s son.
Police seized $4.5 million stuffed into shoeboxes at the home of Süleyman Aslan, then-head of state lender Halkbank. These shoeboxes later became a symbol and shorthand for anyone referencing these investigation. Protesters later mockingly dumped empty shoeboxes outside bank branches.
The investigation’s central figure was Reza Zarrab, an Iranian-Turkish gold trader who was later accused in US court proceedings of helping Iran move money through trade schemes that evaded US sanctions.
Years later Halkbank executive Mehmet Hakan Atilla was convicted in New York and sentenced to 32 months in prison in a sanctions-evasion case that strained US-Turkey ties.
If this had ended like a classic graft scandal, it might have forced resignations, trials and reform. Some resignations did come. But the larger ending was that the investigation itself became the target.
Human Rights Watch warned at the time that the government’s first instinct was not to let prosecutors work but to move against police and officials tied to the investigation.
What followed was reassignments of police, judges and prosecutors and a political counterattack that treated the investigation as an attempted takedown of the government.
By 2014 newly assigned prosecutors dropped the corruption cases against dozens of suspects.
In late 2014 Turkey’s top judicial body suspended prosecutors tied to the graft investigations.
After December 2013 Erdoğan’s government treated the scandal as a political assault by the Gülen movement, a faith-based group inspired by Muslim scholar Fethullah Gülen, who passed away in the US in 2024. In the years that followed, that accusation turned into a purge machine that did not stop with its original target.
A corruption probe became a justification for deeper control over the courts, the police and the media, leaving fewer checks on executive power.
The echo is loud in today’s politics. Erdoğan’s government has spent the past year pursuing a sweeping set of corruption investigations that have targeted officials in CHP-run municipalities, describing a sprawling “octopus” network of corruption. Critics and opposition figures say the judiciary is being used to weaken Erdoğan’s strongest rivals.
Pro-government outlets have also amplified the scale of alleged corruption within CHP ranks. Daily Sabah, a pro-government newspaper, quoted İstanbul Chief Public Prosecutor Akın Gürlek as having called one probe “the biggest corruption case of the century.”
So Başarır’s “shoebox” reference today is a political accusation in shorthand saying that the people who buried one corruption investigation are now selling another as justice, with police power and court power aimed at the opposition.
Turkey’s December 17 is a marker of a turning point. This corruption case, branded as a “judicial coup” by Erdoğan, became a state-building event. And the state that emerged was built to prevent a repeat against Erdoğan, while keeping other opponents on their toes.
The CHP now cites the December 17 corruption files, but it has not made the fate of the investigators a cause, including former İstanbul police chiefs later convicted of attempting to overthrow the government and given aggravated life sentences.
Some analysts frame it as political blowback as the CHP joined, in part, the ruling party’s effort to discredit the 2013 graft probe, and now faces corruption investigations from a state shaped by that discrediting.