PM Erdogan and his gifts

When Erdogan visited South Korea earlier this year, Hyundai’s CEO, Jung Monkoo, gave him two limousines. Monkoo accompanied Erdogan during his tour of the Hyundai factory in Busan, and asked him which car he had liked. Erdogan said he liked the limousine, after which the CEO said two of these cars, worth $ 100,000, would be presented to Erdogan back in Turkey. Reports say that one of the cars is currently being used by the prime minister’s wife, Emine Erdogan.

Meanwhile Toyota announced that they would be giving a six cylinder, 230 horsepower, 4X4 jeep to Erdogan as a new years present. Top officials in Toyota said that they had met with Erdogan and told him about the gift and that the prime minister had told them the he would accept it if the jeep was registered to the Prime Ministry. While some claim that the jeep’s value is around TL 200 billion, Prime Ministry officials say that the jeep costs "no more than TL 60 or 70 billion."

It was really the fault of these car manufacturers that Erdogan got into the habit of getting presents every time he visited a factory or met with company executives. When he attended the opening ceremony of the MAN bus factory in Ankara, he was given a small model of a bus. He joked: "I thought you were going to give me a real one." As a result, he was given a luxury MAN bus that is said to cost Euro 240,000. One can never know when one needs a bus.

The most public incident happened when Erdogan went to Berlin to sign an agreement to purchase 36 planes from Airbus for the Turkish Airlines and asked for a VIP jet plane as a gift. He was told that a jet plane as a gift was impossible, because Turkish officials were receiving the planes at bargain prices and that such a gift would cause their costs to pass the price charged. They instead promissed to present a luxury Mercedes model Maybuch 62, of which only 1,000 were manufactured a year, that costs around TL 1.5 trillion.

The opposition did not look too kindly on Erdogan’s attempts to increase his fleet of cars. Republican People’s Party (CHP) leader Deniz Baykal said Erdogan’s tradesman mentality had got out of hand, calling on the prime minister to never ask for another gift again. He said, "He doesn’t have the right to embarrass the proud Turkish people."