Home Human Rights Turkish Intelligence spends half a billion lira in covert operations to serve Erdoğan

Turkish Intelligence spends half a billion lira in covert operations to serve Erdoğan

Erdoğan is pursuing a strategy to enhance the status of the intelligence service by making it richer, stronger and less accountable.

The site Nordic Monitor has officially revealed the Turkish Intelligence Agency’s spending of approximately half a billion Turkish lira in covert operations in 2020, with a significant increase in the number of assets it owns, valued at more than 32 billion lire.

Turkish intelligence

According to an August 2021 audit report by the Court of Accounts, published by Nordic Monitor, the intelligence agency spent 495.4 million Turkish lira in what was described as “secret service expenditures,” in addition, the value of its assets jumped to 32.7 billion lire, a dramatic increase of 92% over the previous year.

While the organization had only 3.8 billion lira in assets, the Agency amassed enormous wealth over two years, an increase of 761%.

This money flowing into the Agency is another indication of how the Government of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is increasingly relying on intelligence to intimidate his opponents, conduct covert operations abroad, use intelligence to support Turkey’s new national Islamic regime, and constantly spy on opponents in Turkey and abroad.

The report also showed that the Agency spent 1.3 billion lira on components in 2020, and wasted 756.1 million lira from a budget line described as “unspecified,” the same figure being attributed to the consumption of Agency-owned real estate in another section of the report.

In addition, the Agency spent significantly more than its budget of 2.2 billion lira allocated by Parliament for 2020, exceeding its spending ceiling by 274 million, which was subsequently provided to the Agency from the supplementary budget.

This was not all, as the Agency was able to take advantage of the cupboards of the Defense Industry Support Fund (SSDF), an extra budgetary defense resource managed by the head of the defense industry.

With the amendment of the law in 2014, Erdoğan simply allowed the CIA to take advantage of the Defense Support Fund for its expenses, while relieving the Agency of compliance with the Defense Industry Tax Regulations for grants and tenders, so the Agency was not required to disclose any information regarding the money it needed and could conduct tenders for the purchase of weapons in line with its regions, and the defense industry had only to provide funds, regardless of their amount.

According to the report, the Intelligence Service used 76.3 million lire of this defense fund, originally created in 1985 to purchase arms and related materials for the army, and the Turkish army was not satisfied with these new abuses, but the criticism eased after a failed coup attempt on 15 July 2016, when hundreds of generals and thousands of senior officers were demobilized from the army.

Intelligence for Erdoğan

In line with Erdoğan’s goals and strategy, the intelligence agency also has a large share of the President’s discretionary fund to spend on anything he wants without having to disclose any details.

The Monthly Bulletin of Public Financial Management and Transfer shows that funds spent from the estimated fund for the first 10 months of this year amounted to 2.2 billion Turkish lira, whereas for the whole year in 2020 this figure was 2 billion Turkish life.

Details of the Agency’s expenditure had not been properly disclosed and were not open for inspection or investigation.

That is, Erdoğan has pursued a strategy to enhance the status of the intelligence service by making it richer, stronger and less accountable over the years.

Erdogan

Major budget allocations have seen a parallel increase in this strategy. Over the past years, especially after the disclosure of Erdoğan’s dirty secrets through two consecutive corruption operations in 2013, the amount of funds received by the Agency has increased sharply.

The intelligence agency has always enjoyed some immunity from State scrutiny, but today it has become an effective and complete immunity that cannot be compromised, especially since Erdoğan’s revelations of increasing autocracy, having deliberately weakened parliamentary censorship, hampered judicial scrutiny power and silenced their mouths of the press, and allowed it to speak only in his service.

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