türkçe links to original Turkish article
(Hürriyet Newspaper, 25 December 2022)
The good guys.
The U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control
(OFAC) has admitted that it mistakenly placed the names of two
Turkish businessmen on a blacklist for providing "critical financial
and logistic support to the ISIS terrorist organization.", mixing up
the businessmen's names with those of two Turkish brothers who
were tried for this offense in Şanlıurfa. (!)
The businessmen, Ahmet Bayaltun and his nephew İsmail Bayaltun,
live and work in Şanlıurfa in southeastern Turkey. OFAC confused
them with two brothers with the same names in Şanlıurfa who were
tried for connections with ISIS. (!) The (good) Bayaltuns were able to
finally get off the OFAC blacklist after three years with the help of
lawyer Halil Uzun, who represented Hakan Atilla, the former Halkbank
Deputy General Director who was caught up in the U.S. in a scandal
involving sanction-busting dealings with Iran a few years ago.
The (good) Bayaltuns were placed on the OFAC blacklist on 18
November 2019 and their bank accounts in Turkey were shut down,
they could not make bank transfers and their reputations were soiled.
Finally, a few days ago, the (good) Bayaltuns learned that they had
been removed from the OFAC blacklist. İsmail Bayaltun noted that
in 2018 he had been taken into custody in Şanlıurfa in another mix-up
with the (bad) Bayaltuns but freed after the local prosecutor discerned
the name similarity and related confusion.
Ahmet Bayaltun lamented that "we were victimized for more than three
years and had a hard time explaining the matter to our business
partners. We couldn't leave Turkey to participate in meetings and
conferences. Not just our assets were frozen, our lives were too!
We suffered greatly. Only those close to us understood what was
happening. Otherwise, wherever we went this problem cropped up!"
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