A Finance Ministry audit team used falsified documents to carry out a tax inspection at a company close to the Hizmet movement on March 26, Zaman daily has claimed to have learned from anonymous ministry sources.
Zaman reported on Monday that the Finance Ministry's Tax Inspection Board (VDK), which carried out the audits at Kaynak Holding -- a Turkish business group affiliated with Hizmet -- used some fabricated documents for the audits. The VDK is legally required to provide the local prosecutor with documents that contain specific data -- with details as exact times, persons involved and locations -- before it can obtain a prosecutor's order to launch an audit at any company.
The Zaman report says that the VDK decided to carry out an audit at night at the Kaynak headquarters in İstanbul following some emailed documents sent to them by an anonymous source, Ö.A. This source alleged in the email that Kaynak's company operations involved some illegal behaviors.
Kaynak has denied all the allegations as baseless.
Without proving the authenticity of the documents sent by Ö.A, the VDK contacted a number of prosecutors at İstanbul's Çağlayan court. The VDK officials failed to convince any of the prosecutors to issue an order of an audit at Kaynak because the prosecutors found the documents provided for this reason to be baseless claims, Zaman says. According to the daily, the VDK later contacted Abdulkadir Başar at a separate court and he agreed to issue the order.
Once they had received the order from Başar, VDK officials visited the İstanbul Police Department headquarters and a team of 40 police officers carried out the audit at Kaynak during the night of March 26.
The audit at Kaynak came just a day after claims circulated among media outlets that the government intended to launch an operation against business groups with links to the opposition. The audit raised questions about the motives behind recent Finance Ministry visits to certain business groups and companies, with critics claiming that they are politically motivated searches ordered by the government.
Kaynak managers highlighted the fact that some pro-government media outlets rushed to portray the audits as a “midnight raid.”
Published on Cihan, 07 April 2014, Monday
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