The chances that the popular former social democratic mayor of Istanbul can challenge Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan at the polls are increasingly slim. Imamoglu, elected candidate of the social democratic opposition for the next presidential elections, has been in jail since last March and faces a dozen legal proceedings. In the latest summary accepted by the courts, this Tuesday, between 828 and 2,352 years in prison are requested for him for accusations of corruption.
The summary prepared by the Prosecutor’s Office, of 3,900 pages, charges 407 people, of whom 105 are in preventive detention. Imamoglu is accused of “forming a criminal organization for personal gain” that began during his time as mayor of one of the districts of Istanbul and that he extended when he was elected metropolitan mayor of Istanbul in 2019, a position that he retained until after his arrest last March.
Given that the Prosecutor’s Office considers that Imamoglu is the leader of the alleged criminal organization, it also accuses him of all the crimes committed by its alleged members: for example, 70 cases of manipulation of public tenders, 47 cases of bribery, seven of money laundering, four of fraud… and hence the heavy sentence requested for him. The list of crimes he is accused of is very long and includes everything from violating the mining law to causing pollution and selling citizens’ private data.
“The summary is nothing but a string of lies linked one after another,” Imamoglu denounced from prison, accusing the Prosecutor’s Office of “coercing” many of the detainees and “keeping them [arrestados] as hostages” to force them to testify against him. His collaborators have also drawn attention to the fact that the Prosecutor’s summary uses descriptions that President Erdogan had already used in his attacks on Imamoglu, such as comparing the branches of the alleged plot to “the arms of an octopus.”
His party, the Republican People’s Party (CHP), has denounced that a good part of the accusations are based on secret witnesses and that there are numerous inconsistencies in their testimony. “Since 2019, Istanbul Metropolitan City Hall has been the subject of more than 1,000 inspections without evidence of systematic corruption being found,” the party recalls in a statement. For this reason, they consider that this accusation is political and that the polls give him a chance of defeating Erdogan at the polls.
Not in vain, on the eve of his arrest on March 19, Istanbul University canceled Imamoglu’s degree, alleging irregularities, which makes it impossible for the social democratic politician to run in the presidential elections, since the law requires that the head of State and Government have a university degree.
But in addition, he faces 11 judicial proceedings, from those that are still in the investigation phase (among them one for terrorism and ) to those that are pending appeal, such as the one that sentences him to two years and seven months in prison and another number of disqualification for calling a member of the Electoral Board “a fool” and the one that has sentenced him to one year and eight months in prison and political disqualification for “threats and insults” to the provincial head of the Istanbul Prosecutor’s Office, Akin. Gürlek, precisely the one in charge of the new summary that asks for more than two millennia in prison for Imamoglu.
