Ask who is the most famous Turk in the world and the answer is unlikely to be Recep Tayyip Erdoğan or even Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu or even a mainland Turk at all. The winner of this week’s Mr. Notoriety prize must surely go to the Northern Cypriot businessman Asil Nadir, who after 17 years of avoiding trial has decided to return to London from Nicosia to face 66 separate charges of theft.The story has crept into some but not all of the Turkish papers. He is, as far as the İstanbul editors are concerned, yesterday’s news. But it was not always thus. Once upon a time he was not simply a front-page story but a newspaper proprietor in his own right. The company he founded in the UK, Polly Peck International, was during the 1980s the London Stock Exchange’s best performing stock. His rags-to-riches success was once deemed a testament to the ethos of the Thatcher years and his checkbook was at the ready to support not just the Conservative Party in Britain, but the Motherland Party (ANAVATAN) in Turkey. His interest in newsprint was very much encouraged by Turgut Özal, who wanted a loyalist press to counter the volley of opposition flack that was coming from the parvenu newspapers like Sabah. When the UK Serious Fraud Office squad knocked at the door of his Berkeley Square headquarters -- almost the same day that Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait -- it was very much the end of an era.
There were few bigger stories in the British financial press at the time. The collapse of a 2 billion pound public company back in the days when 2 billion meant something is well up on the man-bites-dog scale. Polly Peck was, at the time, the mainstay of the Turkish Cypriot economy. Then there was his sudden bolt to Northern Cyprus in what looked very much like an attempt to flee justice. However, we now learn that, as a result of a technicality, he had not actually jumped bail. The story now is how difficult (and expensive) it will be to prosecute him nearly 20 years after the fact.
In Turkey, Nadir remains a bit of a curio and it may not be surprising that the media is less than totally engaged in his fate. Before his collapse, however, he raised strong passions. That portion of the press he didn’t own, jealous over the depths of his pockets, was determined to smear him any way it could. There were stories about his wife, stories about how he smuggled heroin in cabbages to England but funnily enough no stories about his true vulnerabilities, the bubble through which his businesses were financed. Once he was on his knees and posed no threat, the entire Turkish press corps rallied to his side. His crime, they declared, had nothing to do with artificially propping up his share prices but simply being a Turkish wannabe in caste-ridden Britain. “Where is British justice?” they wanted to know. At the same time Nadir tried to call in his political debts to the Özal government, hoping to find Turkish finance to prop up his fast faltering empire. It was an unrealistic demand, given that in its heyday Polly Peck borrowed on more favorable terms than a debt-ridden Turkish Treasury. Özal was tempted to help, but listened to wiser councils and finally turned his back. The only consolation his government could offer was ministerial statements blaming Polly Peck’s downfall on a slander campaign mounted by the Greek Cypriots.
Mr. Nadir is now nearly 70 and the plane that brought him to Luton Airport must seem to have arrived from a different world -- one before Enron and Lehman Brothers and subprime. The demand for justice from those remaining shareholders who lost their savings in Polly Peck remains -- although if there is an acquittal their wrath may turn to the Serious Fraud Office, whose actions promoted Polly Peck’s collapse. In Turkey, Mr. Nadir’s fate still remains as a lesson to those businessmen who think that taking political sides will protect them from the inevitable rainy day.
