Skip to main content

Failed coup cost Turkey close to $100 billion — Minister


Bulent Tufenkci, Turkish Customs and Trade Minister, said on Tuesday in Istanbul that the failed coup of July 15 has cost Turkey at least 99.9 billion dollars in damages.
He said the damages include destroyed buildings, military equipment, decline in orders abroad for goods and a drop in tourism.
Tufenkci said it was so unfortunate that the coup plotters had tried to create an image that Turkey was a “third world country”.
The minister said photos of tanks on the streets during the night of the putsch attempt were posted all over the city.
He said the situation had improved following the resilience of the local economy, and the quick reopening of the stock exchange.
“The lira has also recovered some of its loses.
“During the peak of concern over the coup, the lira had dropped from about 2.87 to the dollar to 3.09. It is now trading at just below 3 to the dollar,’’ he said.
Tufenkci said the Standard and Poor rating by agencies downgraded Turkey after the coup, citing concerns not only over the economy itself but also checks and balances.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Understanding Prof. Yemi Osinbajo - Abraham Ogbodo

Abraham Ogbodo I am trying to understand Prof. Yemi Osinbajo, the Vice President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. Often, he speaks out of character. That is, he talks as if he is Vice President before he is a professor of law, even when I know that the latter comes first. The man wasn’t like this when he was the attorney general of Lagos State and a teacher at the Law Faculty of the University of Lagos. Then, his statements were measured and as a seasoned lawyer, based on facts. But today, Osinbajo is sounding like Adams Oshiomhole, a union leader, who by the grace of God, became governor of Edo State for eight years. The revelations about big thefts in the economy had come more from Adams than even Ibrahim Magu, chairman of the EFCC. It was Adams who said former petroleum minister; Mrs. Diezani Allison-Madueke alone stole 13 billion British pounds from the national treasury. That is like saying she stole in raw cash almost twice as much as the entire fortune of Alhaj...

Nigerian govt warns rival labour union, ULC, against strike

Following the threat by the United Labour CONGRESS, ULC, to go on a nationwide strike from September 15 , the federal government on Thursday declared the proposed strike illegal. The strike notice was dated September 8 and is expected to lapse on September 15. Some of the issues highlighted by the ULC, a coalition of various workers’ unions, include: the Federal Ministry of Labour and Employment should set up a task force immediately to carry out factory inspection; Government should review the privatisation of Power Holding Company of Nigeria, PHCN; and the Army and Police should withdraw their officers from different work places where they are currently stationed as they intimidate and harass workers in such establishment. The union, a breakaway from the NLC, also demanded the immediate release of its “Registration Certificate.” The ULC is headed by Joe Ajaero, General Secretary of National union of Electricity Employees, NUEE, and Igwe Achese, President of Natio...

The world will have to learn to live with a nuclear North Korea. The alternatives are even worse

The worst possible outcome of the crisis in the Korean peninsula would be a nuclear war. The second worst would be a conventional one. From these simple platitudes everything else follows. The North Korean regime is undoubtedly vile. Its bombs are unnecessary and bought at the cost of great human suffering. The long-term goal of any foreign policy must be to await and, so far as possible, to hasten the end of the dictatorship. But military intervention is no longer a credible option. It could be argued that it never was. The US military seems to have believed since at least 1995 that any war on the Korean peninsula would result in unacceptable casualties and costs. In that case one of the ironies of the present situation is that North Korea has proved, by building one, that it never actually needed a nuclear deterrent. The threat that its conventional artillery and army posed to the South Korean capital, Seoul, where 10 million people live in their range, was enough to preserve ...