Lawyers for brothers Jim and Hakan Ozan, who previously led an economic empire in Turkey before facing legal actions, announced on Friday that their clients would resort to the French judiciary to seek damages amounting to €57.3 billion, or approximately $67.65 billion. The businessman Jim Ozan and his brother Hakan, who led their family empire in Turkey, will file a lawsuit in the Paris court against the Turkish Deposit Insurance Fund (TMSF) as well as companies such as Motorola, Vodafone, BlackRock, and nearly fifty other economic actors.
The Turkish fund "TMSF" had seized all companies belonging to the Ozan family, one of the most influential families in Turkey, in a precautionary measure, accusing them in 2003 of engaging in a large-scale fraud through the Emar Bank that they owned. The Ozan brothers assert in the lawsuit, according to Agence France-Presse, that the Turkish Deposit Insurance Fund committed "brutal and extensive misappropriation that clearly exceeds the authorities granted to it by law," arguing that those who seized these assets are guilty of "fraudulent collusion."
The lawsuit specifically targets Motorola Communications, which at the time sought to recover a debt under a U.S. ruling that awarded it substantial amounts in a case of misappropriation involving billions of euros that Telsim, owned by the Ozan brothers, had borrowed. The two Turkish businessmen, who manage their entire family's interests, estimate the damage inflicted upon them to be $68 billion, representing "the current market value of the concerned assets and activities" as well as "distributed profits... both present and future." They emphasize that the Turkish judiciary has definitively concluded the "complete absence of involvement of the companies" in the fraud case, which reinforces the illegality of the confiscation processes. Current proceedings are not expected to lead to a trial before 2022.
In the 1990s and early 2000s, the Ozan brothers and their father Kemal managed a massive conglomerate covering various sectors from telecommunications to banking, energy, media, and football. However, the fortunes of the wealthy brothers changed when Jim Ozan, often described as the "Turkish Berlusconi," entered politics by founding the Youth Party (nationalist) in 2002. Jim Ozan denies accusations of embezzlement and corruption, claiming to be a victim of political persecution due to his opposition to Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Fearing arrest, he left Turkey on his yacht in 2009 and sought asylum in France, where his brother joined him in 2014.
In 2013, Jim Ozan was sentenced in absentia to 18 and a half years in prison and ordered to pay around €390 million in compensation to the Turkish state. Since 2017, in a dispute with complex ramifications, the Turkish fund "TMSF" initiated legal actions targeting Jim Ozan's assets in France, particularly through precautionary seizures that have since been annulled by French courts.
