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2.10 Politics - shorts
A section of a new legislation amending the competition law allows the competition authority to obtain copies or physical examples of books, data and documents from institutions during an inspection.
Mehmet Ali Yalcindag, chairman of state-sponsored trade group, the Turkey-US Business Council, who partnered with Donald Trump and his daughter Ivanka Trump on the Trump Towers Istanbul deal, addressed letters to the cabinet members, copied to the US president, to increase US trade with Turkey, Courthouse News Service reported on May 28.
Erdogan is currently in the process of repairing relational damage done after Ankara ignored Washington’s objects to its decision to purchase a Russian-made S-400 missile defence system.
Turkey convicted US consulate employee, Metin Topuz, for aiding Gulenists.
Critics accuse Erdogan of using arrested employees of US diplomatic missions as pawns in his negotiations with the Trump administration for favourable policies. There are presently around 50,000 political prisoners held in Turkey, according to Human Rights Watch (HRW).
Howard Eissenstat, an associate professor of Middle East history at St Lawrence University, wrote on Twitter: “[Topuz] worked as liaison and fixer for U.S. law enforcement agencies with their Turkish counterparts. Of course, for much of that time, Gulenists [now banned by Erdogan amid accusations that they orchestrated the attempt to topple him] played an important part in Turkish law enforcement, so Topuz worked with them. It isn't like he could pick and choose whom the Turkish authorities placed in positions of power."
Pre-publication leaks of a new memoir, The Room Where It Happened, by US President Donald Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton, have already put the book top of the US book charts.
In his damning indictment, Bolton argues that the House impeachment inquiry into Trump should not have been limited to the Ukraine affair, but should also have looked into, among other things, the president’s intervention with New York prosecutors’ investigations into Turkey’s Halkbank to curry favour with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
One incident reportedly described was a 2018 discussion with the Turkish president. Bolton says Erdogan gave Trump a memo claiming that a Turkish firm under investigation in the US was innocent. “Trump then told Erdogan he would take care of things, explaining that the southern district [of New York] prosecutors were not his people, but were Obama people, a problem that would be fixed when they were replaced by his people.”
Amid high regional tensions over Turkey’s intervention in Libya, Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi said on June 20 that his country has a legitimate right to intervene in the situation facing its North African neighbour and ordered his army to be ready to carry out any mission that proves necessary.
French President Emmanuel Macron has accused Nato ally Turkey of playing "a dangerous game" in Libya.
Georgia closed the third Gulen-affiliated school.
In 2019, bilateral trade between Turkey and Azerbaijan rose 25% to reach
19 TURKEY Country Report July 2020 www.intellinews.com
