The Nicosia criminal court was on Tuesday shown a television interview of Turkish-Israeli property developer Simon Mistriel Aykut, as his trial for the alleged development and sale of €43 million worth of property on Greek Cypriot land in the north continues.

The interview, which was initially broadcast on Turkish television channel NTV in December 2023, sees Aykut presented as “the chairman of the board of directors of one of the largest real estate construction and sales companies” in the north.

In the video, a presenter said that Aykut had built 3,500 residential properties, mostly near Trikomo, and that 105 of them had been sold to Israeli nationals.

The presenter also said that Aykut is a citizen of both the Republic of Turkey and the ‘TRNC’, with Aykut on the record as saying that he is a partner in a company in Turkey and that beyond that, “all my actions, the companies are in the TRNC”.

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Later in the hearing, Sotiris Phokas of the forensic electronic data laboratory explained that thus far, he has only been able to recover “very little data” from Aykut’s mobile phone and nothing at all from his tablet as they are both password protected.

He added that he had found three mobile sim cards, one of which was Israeli and two of which were Turkish, in Aykut’s possession.

Court proceedings are set to continue on Wednesday, with the court having also decided to schedule two new hearings, for June 2 and June 6.

Aykut was arrested in June last year while attempting to cross from the north to the Republic.

He is the founder of the Afik Group, which has carried out various construction projects in Trikomo, many of which are believed to be on Greek Cypriot land.

Outside of Aykut’s case, the number of cases regarding the alleged illegal development of Greek Cypriot property in the north is on the rise, with two Hungarian nationals having become the first to be sentenced to prison over the matter earlier this month.

They had admitted to promoting and advertising the sale of houses near Kyrenia on the internet.

Meanwhile, the case of a German national who reportedly spoke about selling property in the north to an off-duty police officer during a flight to Larnaca is ongoing, and arrest warrants have been issued for four Turkish nationals in connection with developments in the Famagusta district village of Lefkoniko.

Turkish Cypriot leader Ersin Tatar had described the arrests as “acts of terrorism” and likened the moves to the violence faced by Turkish Cypriots in the 1960s, while the north’s ‘finance minister’ Erhan Arikli  had called for “revenge”.