The CEO of HSBC Turkey, one of the country’s most high-profile executives, is facing an investigation over allegations that he insulted Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan via social media back in 2013, according to Bloomberg. The investigation is a sign that the Turkish state’s crackdown on dissent is intensifying.
The probe is related to a five-year-old retweet sent by HSBC CEO Selim Kervanci during a wave of protests against Erdogan’s rule five years ago. Investigators haven’t said where they got the information. The footage was reportedly from the 2004 German movie “Downfall,” which was set during Adolf Hitler’s last days and depicted the collapse of Nazi Germany (a scene from the movie has been popular fodder for viral Internet jokes in the west).
The demonstrations, which began in June 2013, snowballed from a small sit-in against the redevelopment of the Gezi Park in central Istanbul into a weeks-long nationwide protests against Erdogan’s rule.
Kervanci gave a deposition to Turkish police back in September. Insulting Erdogan is a crime in Turkey, and as the purge inspired by an attempted coup back in 2016 has continued, Turkish police have continued to prosecute thousands of people for allegedly mocking or insulting the president.
The attack on the prominent banker is reminiscent of Erdogan’s screeds against the “interest rate lobby” – the cabal of senior bankers he accused of pushing for higher rates in the country, to the detriment of the Turkish people.
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 Turkish bank by assets. It has 82 branches and 2,250 employees. At one time, HSBC had planned to sell its Turkish unit but has since put those plans on hold after divesting other loss making units.
Turkey prosecuted more than 6,000 people in 2017 for insulting the president. And earlier this year, two of the country’s most popular comedy actors were taken to court over a bit that criticized Erdogan’s authoritarian rule.
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