HSBC Turkey CEO Probed for 2013 Erdogan Retweet, Report Says
Probe relates to HSBC Turkey CEO Selim Kervanci’s retweet of a video during the biggest protests of Erdogan’s rule five years ago.
(Bloomberg) -- A Turkish prosecutor is investigating the head of HSBC Holding Plc’s Turkish unit for allegedly insulting President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, according to Cumhuriyet newspaper, targeting one of the most high-profile executives in the state’s crackdown on dissent.
The probe relates to HSBC Turkey Chief Executive Officer Selim Kervanci’s retweet of a video during the biggest protests of Erdogan’s rule five years ago, Cumhuriyet reported, without saying where it got the information. The video was from the 2004 German movie “Downfall,” set during Adolf Hitler’s last days and depicting the collapse of Nazi Germany, the opposition newspaper said.
Kervanci gave his deposition to police in Istanbul last September, according to Cumhuriyet. HSBC Turkey declined to comment when contacted by Bloomberg. Insulting Erdogan is a crime in Turkey.
Erdogan has revived his attacks on those he blames for organizing the protests ahead of local elections in March. In rallies and speeches, he described the demonstrations as a precursor to the failed coup to remove him in 2016.
In November, the president blamed figures such as billionaire philanthropist George Soros for backing the protesters. The following month, the same accusation was repeated in a document filed by a Turkish prosecutor to a court in Istanbul.
The freedom to publicly criticize Erdogan and his government has already been severely curtailed in Turkey after June 2013, when a small sit-in against the redevelopment of the Gezi Park in central Istanbul morphed into weeks-long nationwide protests against the government.
The repression grew worse after a failed military coup in 2016. What began as a round-up of alleged followers of an Islamic cleric whom Ankara blames of orchestrating the attempted putsch has expanded into a crackdown on journalists, academics and artists opposed to the concentration of vast executive powers in the presidency, a shift approved in a 2017 referendum.
Bankers have also been the subject of Erdogan’s ire. The president has frequently accused an “interest rate lobby” of pushing for higher borrowing costs to cripple Turkey’s economic growth.
HSBC is the 15th-largest among Turkey’s 47 banks by assets, according to the latest data from the Banks Association of Turkey. It has 82 branches and had employed 2,250 people as of September, according to the data.
HSBC Holdings Plc, which put loss-making units on sale in 2015, dropped the plan to divest the Turkish unit after selling its Brazilian operation to Banco Bradesco SA for $5.2 billion. Since then, the Turkish unit has gone through reorganization, reduced its branches and focused on large and multinational companies as well as the public sector and financial institutions.
A total of 6,033 people were prosecuted in 2017 for insulting Erdogan, almost a third of whom were convicted, the advocacy group Human Rights Watch said in October. The figures are up sharply from 132 and 40 in 2014, when Erdogan was elected president.
Most recently, two of the nation’s most prominent comedy actors were hauled before a court after their take-down of authoritarian rule that appeared to allude to a grisly end for Erdogan.
Turkey is also the world’s worst jailer of journalists, with at least 68 in prison for their work, the Committee to Protect Journalists said in a recent report.
--With assistance from Taylan Bilgic.
To contact the reporter on this story: Asli Kandemir in Istanbul at akandemir@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Stefania Bianchi at sbianchi10@bloomberg.net, Alaa Shahine, Paul Abelsky
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