The conviction of 18 members of the Boydak family, prominent industrialists from the Central Anatolian city of Kayseri, and the seizure of their assets amount to a blatant violation of the right to a fair trial and the basic principles of criminal law, independent lawmaker Mustafa Yeneroğlu said Monday, after visiting jailed businessman Memduh Boydak.
Boydak was sentenced to 18 years in prison in 2018 on charges of serving as one of the leaders of an armed terrorist organization due to his alleged links to the faith-based Gülen movement. His sentence was upheld by the Supreme Court of Appeals in 2023.
Turkish 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 an 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.
In a post on X after the visit, Yeneroğlu said the charges against Boydak were based on legal activities such as serving on the board of the Gülen movement-affiliated Melikşah University, depositing money in Bank Asya, which was closed down by the government in 2016, using the ByLock messaging app, making charitable donations and some social media posts.
Since the coup attempt, the Turkish government has accepted such activities as having an account at the now-shuttered Bank Asya, one of Turkey’s largest commercial banks at the time; using ByLock, 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.
Memduh Boydak was the CEO of Boydak Holding, which was among Turkey’s largest industrial groups when seized by Turkish government in August 2016. He had been put in pretrial detention in March 2016 even before the coup attempt over alleged links to the Gülen movement, along with former Boydak Chairman Hacı Boydak and several other company executives.
Boydak Holding was active in a number of sectors, including energy, furniture and banking, with 38 subsidiaries. The holding had an annual turnover of more than TL 6 billion ($2 billion) and employed over 13,000 people before it was confiscated.
Following the coup attempt the Turkish government seized schools, universities, media outlets, companies and their buildings and the assets of individuals, corporations and organizations that were believed to have had ties to the movement.
According to figures published by Turkey’s state-run Anadolu news agency last month, Turkish authorities have seized 784 companies with a total asset value of TL 42.3 billion at the time of their takeover, an estimated $14 billion in 2016 USD terms, as part of the sweeping crackdown on the Gülen movement that followed the abortive putsch.
Turkey’s Savings Deposit Insurance Fund (TMSF) owns 53 percent of Boydak Holding, the name of which was changed to Erciyes Anadolu Holding by the government in 2019, while the remaining 47 percent is owned by other members of the Boydak family.
