Justice Minister Akın Gürlek announced that new measures had been implemented in the fund investigation conducted by the Istanbul Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office’s Money Laundering Crimes Investigation Bureau. In the investigation into the offenses of “establishing or being a member of an organization for the purpose of committing a crime,” “qualified fraud,” “laundering assets derived from crime,” and violating the Capital Markets Law, outflows of money between July 1 and September 16 were examined.
- The assets of 46 legal entities, 18 funds and 42 individuals were frozen.
- A ban on leaving the country was imposed on 37 suspects who had not previously been subject to any measures.
Letters were sent to the relevant institutions to prevent transactions such as transfers, sales, donations, mortgages, pledges, account closures, high-value cash withdrawals and EFT/wire transfers; to freeze capital market instruments; and to report suspicious transactions. Gürlek stated that they aimed to protect citizens’ savings, remedy grievances and trace money and assets.
Why it matters
The measures create a protective framework aimed at preventing potential grievances from growing by making it more difficult for the money and assets covered by the investigation to change hands. For this reason, the decisions affect not only the suspects but also banks, capital market institutions and other relevant organizations; these institutions are required to carry out stricter checks before executing certain transactions. The restrictions on leaving the country, meanwhile, constitute a judicial measure intended to ensure that certain suspects remain accessible for the purposes of conducting the investigation. The key unresolved issue is determining which transactions the money movements under examination are connected to and how the frozen assets will be used to remedy the grievances.
Background
Gürlek is not a new name in the FikirPilot archive: we have published 6 articles mentioning this name in the last 90 days; the latest is dated September 25, 2026.