Parliamentary assembly member for the People’s Democratic Party (HDP) called for an urgent inquiry into the findings in the leaked ‘Pandora Papers’ according to which there are more than 220 individuals and companies from Turkey involved in tax evasion scams.
Kemal Peköz, MP and Turkish Assembly member for Turkey’s southern province of Adana, said in his call for an urgent inquiry that the names of those individuals and companies mentioned in the Pandora Papers are identified, their commercial activities are investigated, and that the necessary steps are taken in relation to their taxing activities carried out in tax havens for the purposes of tax avoidance.
Dubbed the Pandora Papers, the 12 million leaked files constitute the biggest such leak in history and they are being looked through by over 600 journalists from 117 countries under the supervision of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. There are more than 220 names from Turkey found in the papers involved in cases of tax evasion.
One of these companies that has been indicated in the leaked files is that of a major Turkish government contractor, Rönesans Holding which has transferred at least $210 million acquired from Turkish government contracts to Swiss bank accounts – including money from the construction of Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s sumptuous Presidential Palace in the capital Ankara according to a report by Deutsche Welle Turkish.
The report also says that the company was paid roughly 16 billion Turkish Liras ($1.8 billion in even today’s vastly devalued Turkish currency) through 10 contracts within the last five years.
According to the report, two bubble companies linked to the Rönesans Holding, a Covar Trading Ltd. and a Dolmine International Ltd had over $210 million transferred to their Swiss accounts in just 2015 alone, with the annual interest of the accounts being more than $491,000.
