Doğan Yayın's immediate reaction was to accuse Finance Ministry officials of discriminating against the group and interpreting the law incorrectly. There are also reports that Doğan is seeking a settlement with officials rather than filing a lawsuit for the abrogation of the fine, the highest ever imposed on a Turkish company. Analysts do not agree with Doğan's argument that the government has waged a war on the company to prevent it from criticizing the government, as they think there has been a change in the system where those involved in financial irregularities and tax evasion will no longer go unpunished. Yeni Şafak's Taha Kıvanç finds it strange that all the journalists working for Doğan's newspapers and television stations use the same scenario when discussing the background of the record fine imposed on Doğan Yayın and not even a single one of them has voiced suspicions about this scenario. According to them, the prime minister called the finance minister and asked him to “finish off the Doğan Group”; the finance minister then commissioned his undersecretary and then a finance comptroller to audit Doğan's tax record. According to Kıvanç, it is not difficult to guess why the Doğan journalists think this way, because governments in the past punished finance comptrollers who revealed the financial irregularities of big companies because of their own interests. “I think the situation is really different today as it is possible to ask for an accounting from those involved in wrongdoings. And the problem results from this,” he says. On Doğan's questioning of why Finance Ministry officials revealed only Doğan's irregularities and turned a blind eye to the irregularities of other companies, Kıvanç says there is no discrimination against any company and that the Finance Ministry is very strict about imposing fines on all of the companies which are involved in illegal financial practices, the only difference is that those companies do not have the media power of Doğan in which to create an uproar over the fines imposed on them. In addition, Kıvanç does not agree that the record fine imposed on Doğan came about as a result of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's personal dislike for the group because he thinks the government would not want to lose the support of a big media group at a time when it is taking important steps to solve Turkey's decades-long Kurdish problem and normalize relations with Armenia, as this group supports both of these government initiatives.
According to Star's Şamil Tayyar, Doğan's irregularities have been revealed due to a system change in the Finance Ministry, where senior finance comptrollers, some of whom were employed by Doğan after their retirement from the ministry, have requested that finance comptrollers currently working not impose fines on Doğan. “I do not know what he is going to do with dozens of retired senior finance comptrollers working for him, Aydın Doğan should know that the era of senior finance comptrollers has ended. No matter how this process is concluded, nothing will remain the same as before. The business world, meaning mainly the media bosses, will have to stop the practice of evading taxes based on the tradition of [exploiting the connections of former] senior financial comptrollers," says Tayyar.
