Omer Faruk Karaguzel, the lawyer of Turkey’s ambassador in the north Yasin Ekrem Serim, on Wednesday threatened to “use our legal rights against baseless news and slander” after Turkish opposition party CHP leader Ozgur Ozel had drawn links between Serim, his father Maksut Serim, Turkish Cypriot businessman Halil Falyali, who was assassinated in 2022, and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Ozel had said on Tuesday he wished to ask Erdogan a question about Serim junior, saying, “the special thing about this gentleman is that you know his father, Maksut Serim, very well”.
He said that when Erdogan was Turkey’s prime minister between 2003 and 2014, it was Serim senior who was in control of Erdogan’s discretionary funds.
“You were making headlines because the discretionary funds’ budget grew by 10 or 15 times in that period compared to previous times. It is also known that [Maksut Serim] has a strong accounting book and that you have great confidence in him in that regard,” he said.
He added that Yasin Ekrem Serim had become an undersecretary at Turkey’s foreign ministry “despite the fact he did not come through the ministry’s processes and did not come from a professional background”, before being made deputy minister in 2022 and then ambassador to the north last year.
“Meanwhile, it was revealed that he had established a joint company with Halil Falyali, the leader of an organised crime organisation,” he said, adding that the company was founded in 2020.
He said Yasin Ekrem Serim had then filed a lawsuit against CHP MPs Murat Emir and Yunus Emre after they had drawn links between Serim and Falyali, but that the CHP had won those suits.
“We provided the evidence, they won the lawsuits, and you knowingly as if you were pointing a dinger at him appointed him as the ambassador to our Cyprus, to Nicosia,” he said.
He added, “now, foreign ministry sources are urgently writing to diplomatic correspondents that the ambassador in Nicosia is about to be sacked, that he will be replaced, and that he is waiting for a decree”.
Karaguzel reacted on Wednesday by describing Ozel’s statements as “baseless”, and an “obvious assault on Serim’s reputation made through ambiguous and unclear statements”.
“The claim that he established a joint company with Halil Falyali is clearly a lie and slander, and this has been stated many times before,” he said.
He said Serim’s dealings with Falyali amount to nothing more than the transfer of company shares in exchange for “a simple real estate sale”.
It had been reported that Falyali had established a company by the name of Northern Associates Trading Ltd in 2020, and that Serim and his brother Halil Ibrahim Serim were both partners of the company, owning a combined 10 per cent share.
The company reportedly dealt with land sales, construction, the import and export of machinery, as well as the running of various entertainment venues.
However, it has been alleged that Falyali also engaged in illicit activities, with his widow Ozge Tasker Falyali having been one of 250 people indicted in Turkey following a large-scale investigation into money laundering and illegal gambling.
Ozge Tasker Falyali was, according to the indictment, part of a “criminal organisation founded and led by Halil Falyali”, which the chief public prosecutor’s office in Turkey’s capital city Ankara now accuses of having violated betting laws and of having laundered “assets originating from crime”.
The indictment reads that the late Halil Falyali had “sent the assets obtained from illegal gambling to bank accounts belonging to members of the organisation”, with the money converted to cryptocurrency and then being transferred back to him and to other members of the organisation.
Turkey’s financial crimes investigation board claimed in a report that a total of 218 people had deposited over 2.5 billion TL (€70.5 million) into various bank accounts over a total of 118,148 transactions, with almost all of that money then disappearing into cryptocurrency wallets.
Ozel’s comments came after rumours surfaced earlier this month that Serim, who only formally undertook the role of ambassador in August, had been relieved of his duties and replaced by Ali Murat Basceri, who had served as Turkey’s ambassador in the north between 2018 and 2022.
The Cyprus Mail contacted Turkey’s embassy in northern Nicosia and was told by a spokesman that they were “not in a position to comment on the matter”.
Serim has not been seen in public since then.
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