Rönesans Holding, one of the major beneficiaries of a construction boom in Turkey under the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, transferred hundreds of millions of dollars in profit offshore, Deutsche Welle reported. The company, which has won 10 public tenders worth an estimated $16 billion over the past five years, transferred $210.7 million to the British Virgin Islands to evade tax, the German news outlet said on Monday, citing documents obtained in the Panama Papers investigation, which has exposed the offshore investments of the world’s richest and most powerful people. Erman Ilıcak, the founder of Rönesans, set up two companies in Switzerland in the name of his mother Ayşe Ilıcak on March 17, 2014, during the construction of a vast presidential palace in Turkey’s capital Ankara. One of the firms – Covar Trading Ltd., received $105.52 million in 2015 and, during the same year, $104.48 million was transferred from its accounts to an undisclosed destination as a “donation”, Deutsche Welle said. The other company, Dolmine International Ltd., received $105.2 million in 2015 and the money was deposited in an account of the Swiss bank Banque Picet & Cie, from which it earned interest. Both firms performed no economic activity in 2016 and 2017, the news outlet said. Erman Ilıcak has won lucrative tenders to construct power stations and hospitals in Turkey under Public-Private Partnership projects (PPPs), has also snapped up huge construction deals in Libya, and is involved in preparatory work to build a canal through Istanbul at the cost of tens of billions of dollars in public money. If the two companies had paid taxes on the $210.7 million then the Turkish Treasury would have received 750 million Turkish liras, enough to pay the monthly salary of 115,000 teachers in Turkey, or to build 25 schools or eight hospitals, according to Deutsche Welle. In April 2019, Rönesans won tenders to build 15 hospitals and medical units across Russia after talks between Erdoğan and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow. In 2019, Rönesans completed construction of a 640 million lira summer palace for Erdoğan near the southern resort town of Marmaris, according to media reports at the time. The firm has also built skyscrapers in Turkey, Russia and Central Asia. (This story was updated with construction contracts in the final paragraph.)
Ahval