Tatar ordered to pay damages to Turkish Cypriot newspaper

Turkish Cypriot leader Ersin Tatar has been ordered in court to pay 20,000TL (€1,036) in damages to the Ozgur Gazete newspaper for inflammatory remarks made about the newspaper.

The court case concluded on Wednesday in northern Nicosia, with Tatar set to decide against appealing the ruling.

The dispute goes back the 2020 Turkish Cypriot leadership election, during which Ozgur Gazete published an article entitled ‘Here are photos of the intervention’.

The “intervention” in question was alleged interference on the part of Turkish governing party AK Party in the elections, held on October 11 and 18, 2020.

In the article, the newspaper alleged that a team of 20 people from Turkey’s leading party’s marketing division, including then Turkish vice president Fuat Oktay’s press advisor Ali Genc, were holding daily meetings with Tatar and his campaign team at the Lord’s Palace hotel in Kyrenia for over a month before the election took place.

Alongside the article, Ozgur Gazete shared several photographs which showed then ‘economy minister’ Hasan Tacoy exiting the hotel accompanied by Genc and a team of others at 2:30am on October 2, 2020, and Tatar arriving at the hotel with a dossier at 5:30pm the following day.

Tatar, ‘prime minister’ at the time, had his office release a statement accusing the newspaper’s employees of being “spies and agents” and of working with foreign intelligence organisations.

The newspaper’s editor in chief Pinar Barut said the court’s decision was “very important for Turkish Cypriot press and journalists,” and added “we were only doing journalism by documenting the interventions against the will of the Turkish Cypriot community and secret meetings.”