ISTANBUL, Turkey — Turkish President
Recep Tayyip Erdogan has sacked the head of the
state statistics agency,
according to a decree published Saturday, after releasing data showing last
year's inflation rate hit a 19-year high of 36.1 percent.
اضافة اعلان
Sait Erdal Dincer was just the latest in a
series of economic dismissals by Erdogan, who has sacked three central bank
governors since July 2019.
Erdogan has railed against high-interest
rates, which he believes cause inflation — the exact opposition of conventional
economic thinking.
The 2021 inflation figure released by Dincer
angered both the pro-government and opposition camps.
The opposition said it was underreported,
claiming that the real cost of living increases were at least twice as high.
Erdogan meanwhile reportedly criticized the
statistics agency in private for publishing data that he felt overstated the
scale of Turkey's economic malaise.
Dincer seemed to sense his impending fate.
"I sit in this office now, tomorrow it
will be someone else," he said in an interview with the business newspaper
Dunya earlier this month.
"Never mind who is the chairman. Can
you imagine that hundreds of my colleagues could stomach or remain quiet about
publishing an inflation rate very different from what they had
established?"
"I have a responsibility to 84 million
people," he added.
Erdogan did not explain his decision to
appoint Erhan Cetinkaya, who had served as vice-chair of Turkey's banking
regulator, as the new state statistics chief.
"This will just increase concern about
the reliability of the data, in addition to major concerns about economic
policy settings," Timothy Ash of BlueBay Asset Management said in a
note to clients.
The agency is due to publish January's
inflation data on February 3.
Justice minister also sacked
In December, opposition leader
Kemal Kilicdaroglu
was refused an appointment with Dincer and turned away by security guards when
he sought to enter the statistic agency's headquarters in Ankara.
He had accused the agency of
"fabricating" the numbers to hide the true impact of the government's
policies and slammed it as "no longer a state institution but a palace
institution", in reference to Erdogan's presidential complex.
Also on Saturday, Erdogan appointed a new
justice minister, naming former deputy prime minister
Bekir Bozdag to replace
veteran ruling party member Abdulhamit Gul.
"I have resigned from my duties at the
ministry of justice, which I have been serving since July 19, 2017," Gul
wrote on Twitter.
"I would like to express my
gratitude... for accepting my request," he added, without explaining his
decision.
Ali Babacan, former deputy prime minister
who left the ruling AKP party and founded the Deva Party, took to Twitter to
vent fury over the changes.
"The justice minister is being
replaced, (statistics agency) TUIK chairman is being dismissed before the
inflation data is published. Nobody knows why," he said.
"The authoritarian alliance... keeps on
harming the country," he said, referring to the AKP and its nationalist
partner MHP.
Another presidential decree published on
Saturday urged authorities to prevent the spread of threats stemming from
media activities that are incompatible with national and moral values — which
was slammed as censorship by observers.
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