Turkish court orders asset seizure in BoraJet Airlines case

On the recommendation of the Istanbul Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office, the Istanbul Magistrates’ Court has ordered the seizure of assets belonging to 14 individuals as part of a money-laundering investigation, including those belonging to Sezgin Baran Korkmaz, chairman of defunct carrier BoraJet Airlines (YB, Istanbul Sabiha Gökcen), the Turkish newspaper Sözcü reported. The seizure of assets was aimed at collecting further evidence, the court said. The assets include several communications, energy, investment, pharmaceuticals, and technology firms that are part of an ongoing fraud case in the United States. As ch-aviation reported at the time, BoraJet Airlines, founded in 2010, was acquired by Korkmaz’s Turkish private equity firm SBK Holding for a reported USD260 million in late 2016. It suspended all operations on April 24, 2017, saying it had to resolve “technical issues” affecting its fleet of two E190s and four E195s. However, the scheduled carrier, which had served 18 destinations in Turkey, Germany, Lebanon, Iraq, Northern Cyprus, Italy, and Greece, never resumed its flights. The latest court order follows a request from US prosecutors in September to seize firms owned by the brothers Jacob and Isaiah Kingston, dubbed the Mormon crime brothers, as well as Lev Dermen, also known as Levon Termendzhyan. All are longtime associates of Korkmaz, according to the online news website Ahval. Dermen currently faces trial in the United States over a USD1 billion mail fraud scheme. The Kingstons, meanwhile, face trial in Utah accused of transferring about USD140 million to Korkmaz’s SBK Holding as part of a decade-long fraud that allegedly conned the United States Internal Revenue Services (IRS) out of at least USD470 million in total.