After years of delays, the legal proceedings for the famous ‘Burj Al Babas’ complex, considered one of the biggest urban planning disasters in the history of Turkey, seem to be underway: the indictment has been published, in which the prosecution is seeking a total of 885 years in prison for the 13 defendants accused for the project, who are charged with massive fraud that led to the conversion of a supposed housing development of luxury homes into a pile of ruins.
Burj Al Babas was an urban development project launched in 2014 by the Sarato Group in the Mudurnu district of the province of Bolu, about 240 kilometres southeast of Istanbul. The plan was to build 732 luxury villas designed as miniature châteaux, each measuring 325 square metres and with three floors (all virtually identical), on a completely new site intended to attract foreign investors, particularly Arabs.
The name, which meant ‘Towers of Babas’ in Arabic, was in fact a mixture of the Arabic word Burj (‘Tower’) and ‘Babas’, referring to the name of nearby thermal baths. Each of these villas cost up to $530,000, and there were plans to build a dome-shaped structure in the centre of the residential complex to house a large shopping centre, a hamam or Turkish bath, a mosque, a cinema, sports pavilions and a horse riding area, among other facilities.
With the aim of attracting Arab inversors, the owners of the complex, the Yerdelen brothers, who are involved in construction, gave it the commercial name Burj Al Babas Thermal Tourism Company and opened a sales office in Kuwait to market the houses directly in that country. The project sparked widespread criticism for its impact on the environment and landscape, as it was also located just 3 km from Mudurnu, a village of just 5,000 inhabitants known for its old Ottoman-style houses. Finally, in 2019, the project’s developers declared bankruptcy with debts amounting to $5 million.
The project was declared bankrupt without a single house being delivered
Turkish news agencies have now reported that the public prosecutor’s office considers the three top executives of the Turkish construction company Sarot, including brothers Mehmet Emin Yerdelen, Adem Tekgöz and Mezher Yerdelen, to be responsible for fraud and has requested the seizure of all the company’s property and assets. Prosecutors assigned to the case point out that the developers, who attempted to finance the project through private contributions of foreign capital, not only failed to make it financially viable but also failed to fulfil any of the promises made to buyers.
In total, the builders managed to sell around 350 luxury villas to customers in Gulf countries, mainly Kuwait, some of whom were prominent investors and businesspeople. However, they never delivered a single one of the homes sold. Drowning in debt, they kept promoting and selling the huge urban development project outside Turkey even after 2018, when they had already filed for bankruptcy and knew they would never be able to fulfil their commitments.
Between the start of the project in 2014 and 2018, the construction company received more than $67 million, the destination of which is now unclear. The Financial Crimes Investigation Commission, attached to the Turkish Ministry of Finance, said in a report that it had found accounting chaos: lost payment documents, inconsistencies between bank transactions and the company’s own internal data… A disastrous management of a disastrous project doomed to failure, which today still stands as a silent, abandoned witness to an urban planning disaster that should never have happened.
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As a history lover, Pablo Gómez was captivated by Turkey from the first day he visited it in 2006: he got married there, has a house there… and has since become an expert on Turkey’s current affairs. With a long experience in media, he has been at the helm of hispanatolia.com since 2011.
