Turkish authorities have jailed Elif Boydak Bozdağ, another member of one of the country’s most prominent business families, after Turkey’s top appeals court upheld her conviction over alleged ties to the Gülen movement.
According to the TR724 news website, Boydak Bozdağ was taken into custody in Istanbul late Friday and sent to Bakırköy women’s prison after Turkey’s Supreme Court of Appeals upheld her six-year, three-month sentence. She is the daughter of Şükrü Boydak, a former board member of Boydak Holding, the industrial group behind furniture brands that still account for roughly 30 percent of Turkey’s domestic market despite being seized by the state after a failed coup in 2016.
Boydak Bozdağ was convicted for depositing money in Bank Asya, a lender that was later shut down by Turkish authorities over alleged links to the Gülen movement.
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been targeting followers of the Gülen movement, inspired by the late Muslim cleric Fethullah Gülen, since corruption investigations in December 2013 implicated him as well as some members of his family and inner circle.
Dismissing the investigations as a Gülenist coup and a conspiracy against his government, Erdoğan began to target the movement’s members. He designated the movement as a terrorist organization in May 2016 and intensified the crackdown on it following the abortive putsch in July of the same year that he accused Gülen of masterminding. The movement strongly denies involvement in the coup attempt or any terrorist activity.
Since the coup attempt in 2016, the Turkish government has accepted such activities as having an account at Bank Asya, one of Turkey’s largest commercial banks at the time; using the ByLock messaging application, an encrypted messaging app that was available on Apple’s App Store and Google Play; and subscribing to the now-shut-down Zaman daily or other publications affiliated with members of the movement as benchmarks for identifying and arresting alleged followers of the Gülen movement on charges of membership in a terrorist organization.
Founded in the central Turkish city of Kayseri in 1957, Boydak Holding grew into one of Turkey’s largest manufacturing groups, with flagship furniture brands such as Istikbal, Bellona and Mondi that still dominate the domestic market. The holding was also active in the energy and banking sectors and had an annual turnover of more than $2 billion and employed over 13,000 people before it was confiscated.
Multiple members of the Boydak family have been jailed over the past decade, and their bank accounts and assets were seized as part of the post-coup crackdown, dismantling one of Turkey’s most powerful industrial dynasties.
