Internet killed the Wall Street star
One hopes IMF missions don't leave such mayhem every time they depart a struggling country. Just after a Washington team quit Turkey in early July the treasury minister shot himself (happily not fatally), and the deputy treasury under-secretary resigned, quoting national poet Nazim Hikmet.
The reasons are still quite obscure. Ex-treasury minister Hikmet Ulugbay (with his jaw in plaster) blamed overwork after three weeks of IMF arm-wrestling.
The Turkish press had another story: that Ulugbay had leaked a vital IMF document to former prime minister Mesut Yilmaz, now a party leader in the coalition, who passed the information to his cousin Mehmet Kutman, who runs Global Securities in Istanbul. (Trading on the Istanbul stock exchange surged on the three final days of the IMF's visit.)
Yilmaz confirms he saw the document, as he had every right to do. Kutman denies any hand in market manipulation. Indeed, what measurable effect could an IMF report have on the Turkish stock market, which is jerked around every day by rumour and counter-rumour? Treasuries or the lira would have been a more obvious target.