Debt-free municipality in debt after trustee appointment: 19 immovables for sale

* Photo: Siirt Municipality / Facebook

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The Municipality of Siirt province in southeast Turkey has put 19 immovable properties up for sale by tender.

Berivan Helen Işık, one of the two dismissed Co-Mayors of Siirt from the Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP), has stated that the Municipality of Siirt did not have any debt when they were in office.

Dismissed Co-Mayor Işık has said that Osman Hacıbektaşoğlu, both the Governor of Siirt and the current Mayor of the province, has put the Municipality, which did not have any debt, under a burden of debt.

With the debt exceeding 115 million Turkish Lira (TRY), immovable properties (thousands of square meters of agricultural land and estates) have been put up for sale by tender for an estimated price of 20 million 862 thousand TRY. Of these 19 immovables, 13 are located in Evren, four in Çal and the other two are located in Yağmurtepe and Kooperatif neighborhoods.

The related properties will be sold by tender to be held in the Municipality's Service Building on December 14, 2021.

'They will be sold below their value'

Speaking to Fethi Balaman from Mezopotamya Agency (MA), Berivan Helen Işık has said that the immovable properties of the Siirt Municipality will be sold below their value by the trustee administration.

Noting that the debt-free Siirt Municipality has been indebted over 115 million TRY since the elected co-mayors were removed from office and a trustee was appointed on February 6, 2017, Işık has defined what has been happening since then as the product of a "plundering mindset". She has protested that all achievements of the municipality have been destroyed:

"The first thing the appointed trustee did was to demolish the Celadet Ali Bedirhan Library. Then, pasifizing the Women's Consultancy Center (Berfin), he has closed down the municipality's website in Kurdish.

"He has allocated the place used as a house for expressing condolences to the Idealist Hearths (ultranationalist grey wolves). Right afterwards, he has granted all means of the municipality to the pro-government mindset and groups by either allocating them or via the article 21/b."

'Only the personnel expenses over 9 million'

Işık has also criticized that after the trustee came into office, 63 workers have been dismissed and "ghost employees" have been hired in their place. "Only the personnel expenses of the municipality are now over 9 million TRY. Most of them are ghost employees. There is no work for production or service. They have consumed what we produced," she has said.

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(HA/SD)