(Bloomberg) -- After winning Istanbul’s local election in a landslide, Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu said he’s had to fight through a budgetary “black hole” of about 14 billion liras ($2.4 billion).
Speaking on Monday at a news conference in Istanbul to mark his sixth month in power, Imamoglu said the municipal government of Turkey’s largest city had 6 billion liras of overdue debt and ran a budget deficit of 7.9 billion liras when he took over.
Since ending more than a quarter-century of rule in Istanbul by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s party and its predecessors, Imamoglu said the deficit has been reduced to 4.7 billion liras, while overdue debt “didn’t increase” after six months. The amount of tax owed by municipal companies has been “largely paid,” while the rest is being restructured, he said.
Imamoglu, who catapulted to prominence by railing against wasting public resources during his campaign, repeated that state-run lenders have refused to lend to the municipality since he took charge. Still, the mayor said he was able to find financing during recent visits to European capitals.
Imamoglu won the March local elections by a slender margin of a few thousand votes, but authorities nullified the vote after Erdogan and his allies complained of election fraud. In the June 23 do-over, Imamoglu beat the ruling party’s candidate Binali Yildirim by nearly a million votes.
“We will never allow squandering, we will attain maximum savings,” Imamoglu said.
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