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| Gülen vs Erdogan |
Just six years after the most devastating banking crisis since the Great Depression, a calamity that forced governments to spend trillions to rescue financial systems and save ‘too-big-to-fail’ banks, it’s surely inconceivable that a national leader should openly badmouth one of his country’s leading banks to bankruptcy.
Not in Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey.
For the last year, Erdogan and his long-ruling Justice and Development Party government have been conducting a bitter vendetta against Bank Asya, Turkey’s 12th biggest bank and its biggest Islamic ‘participation’ bank.
Describing it as ‘bankrupt,’ ‘bust’ and ‘failed,’ Erdogan has taken nearly every opportunity to traduce the hapless Bank Asya. His aides and advisors have gleefully ripped into the bank too, torpedoing two takeover deals – one friendly, one not – because they’d prefer to see it fail.
Under Erdogan’s withering attack, Bank Asya has endured a run, the loss of big state-owned customers who withdrew business under government pressure, a 40% slump in assets and a halving of deposits. Unsurprisingly, Bank Asya’s once-healthy profits have disappeared into losses, and its share price has fallen by 60%.
Turkey’s leader for 12 years, Erdogan has also threatened two of the country’s most-trusted independent institutions, the Banking Regulation and Supervision Agency and the Central Bank of Turkey, for not doing his bidding and shutting down Bank Asya.
