Erdoğan corruption: Expenses of presidential palace stand at 2.5 billion lira in five months

Shaima Hafezy

In addition to the support of terrorist groups, the expenses of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s presidential palace during the past five months have increased in an unprecedented manner, amounting to about 2.5 billion lira (about 431.3 million US dollars). It also includes covert expenses, according to the Turkish Ministry of Finance.

Erdogan continues to break the record after recording the highest presidential expenditure in the history of Turkey, during the last year 2018, when the total presidential expenditure stood at 1.6 billion pounds.

In the first five months of this year until May, the presidential expenditure amounted to 490.4 million Turkish lira. By the end of May, half of the presidential allocations, which amounted to 2.8 billion Turkish lira at the beginning of the year, were subsequently increased to 3.1 billion Turkish lira.

In January, the presidency spent 303 million lira. This amount fell in February to stand at 222 million lira and continues to decline in March to 191 million lira. Then the expenditure rose again in April to record 522 million lira while in May it reached 250 million lira, Turkish local media.

Budget statistics revealed that the current year 2019 will continue to increase those expenditures, which escalated following the election of Erdogan as president of Turkey.

In 2014, the presidential expenditure amounted to 266 million Turkish lira. In 2015, this expenditure rose to 543 million Turkish lira. The expenditure continued to rise in 2016 to 345 million Turkish lira. In 2017 it reached 663 million Turkish lira and in 2018 it rose to 1.6 billion Turkish lira.

If presidential spending continues to rise at this rate, it will record twice as much as last year.

In 2014, the volume of covert expenditures amounted to 78.1 million Turkish lira, while in FY06 this expenditure increased to 1.7 billion Turkish lira. In 2016, secret expenditures amounted to 1.616 billion Turkish lira and continued to rise in 2017 by 2 billion Turkish lira.

In May, private expenditures recorded the lowest levels during the year by 60 million lira, but the total expenditure since the beginning of this year exceeded one billion Turkish lira.

According to data from the Ministry of Finance, the budget deficit recorded a deficit of 12.1 billion Turkish lira in the month of May this year, reaching 2.7 billion Turkish lira in the same month of 2018.

According to Ismael Uygur, head of the People’s Party’s division in the town of Turbali in the city of Izmir, 13 million lira was spent on advertising, food and receptions under the former mayor of the ruling Justice and Development Party, Yashar Gormaz, between 2014 and 2019.