Journalist sentenced to imprisonment and damages for reporting Parliament Speaker’s sons’ offshore companies

A former Cumhuriyet reporter, Pelin Ünker, on Tuesday received one year one month 15 days imprisonment and ordered to pay 8, 860 TL for exposing the off-shore companies allegedly belong to Parliament Speaker Binali Yıldırım’s sons in tax-haven Malta.

Another Cumhuriyet reporter Canan Coşkun announced the court verdict on Twitter stating that there is no suspension in punishment. The case will be appealed in the upper court.

 

Reporter Ünker had revealed Yıldırım’s sons’ ties to an offshore company situated in a tax haven that were exposed in 2015 by the Panama Papers, the work of investigative journalists who revealed the corrupt business ties with tax havens of politicians and businesspeople.

In the Panama Papers it turned out that then Prime Minister Binali Yıldırım’s sons Erkam and Bülent Yıldırım owned five companies in Malta named ‘South Seas Shipping N.V.’, ‘Nova Warrior Limited’, ‘Dertel Shipping Limited’,  ‘Hawke Bay Marine Co Ltd.’ and ‘Black Eagle Marine Co Ltd.’

In early November,  Yıldırım and two of his sons filed a criminal complaint against journalist Ünker from the Cumhuriyet daily for allegedly “insulting a public official” with her reporting on passages concerning Yıldırım in the Paradise Papers.

Ünker had previously been the subject of a lawsuit for damages filed by the Yıldırım family for her reporting.

In November a Turkish court  sentenced the Evrensel daily and caricaturist Sefer Selvi to pay TL 10,000 ($1,800) to Yıldırım and his son Erkam Yıldırım for attacking them in public with a caricature published in the newspaper.

 

Selvi’s caricature featured then-Prime Minister Yıldırım and his son’s alleged ties to an offshore company situated in a tax haven that were exposed in 2015 by the Panama Papers.

Lawyers for the Yıldırım family complained that the caricature depicted Yıldırım and his son as evading taxes and portrayed them as “ridiculous and comical.”

The post Journalist sentenced to imprisonment and damages for reporting Parliament Speaker’s sons’ offshore companies appeared first on Turkish Minute.

from Turkish Minute https://www.turkishminute.com/2019/01/08/journalist-sentenced-to-imprisonment-and-damages-for-reporting-parliament-speakers-sons-offshore-companies/