Not Just Business As Usual

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"Lies! A bunch of outright lies!" Uzan says of the Motorola complaint, which among other things charges the family with using libel and extortion to intimidate its enemies. Judge Rakoff, he claims, is anti-Turkish. "He is biased against Turkey, against the Turkish people." As for the High Court judge in the U.K. who slapped Uzan family members with a 15-month jail term for contempt of court and a worldwide freeze on assets, he "thinks he rules the world." The whole Motorola-Nokia lawsuit is merely a "business dispute between one company and another" and should be dealt with in arbitration, says Uzan. He claims his family would have paid back the money if Turkey had not suffered a major economic crisis.

That doesn't help Nokia and Motorola. As a result of the losses, Motorola is facing 19 class actions from investors who say the firm failed to disclose that it was financing the sales it made to Telsim. Motorola lawyer Howard Stahl insists that his clients were prudent. "When you looked at the Uzans you found they were tough and hard but not radically different than the other people in developing countries who do oil or telecom. You had to deal with them."

Uzan's real venom, however, is reserved for Prime Minister Erdogan, whose Justice and Development Party was founded on Islamic principles. The move to shut down the family's profitable utilities stung. "What kind of a Muslim are you, man?" Uzan told a crowd in Bursa after the government seized the utilities. "You infidel!" The speech was subsequently re-broadcast on Uzan-owned television stations, earning Cem another libel suit — this time from Erdogan, who is seeking $600,000 in damages. Last week a prosecutor charged Uzan with insulting the government, a crime under Turkish law punishable by up to six years in prison. In his interview with Time, Uzan pulled out a Turkish dictionary, flipped to a page bookmarked for the occasion, and read from the colloquial definition of the word infidel: "'without mercy, pitiless, without conscience.'" In that context, he says, "I would say it again."

The government insists it was merely upholding the law when it shut the Uzan businesses down. Energy Minister Hilmi Guler said the Uzan utilities failed to pay debts and repeatedly refused to turn over their transmission lines to the newly formed national grid. Erdogan denied that his government was engaged in a political witch-hunt. "We have no personal vendetta," he said last week. "We have a duty to the people who elected us to rid the country of dirty odors." Analysts agree that while the crackdown may serve a political purpose, it may also be part of a long overdue anticorruption drive required by the European Union as a condition for accession negotiations to begin. "If you are going to fight corruption, you have to deal with the Uzans," claims Radikal columnist Berkan.

Bizarrely, state-owned companies continue to go Uzan's way. In June the family won yet another privatization bid, this one for the petroleum company Petkim, though it's unclear how it will come up with the down-payment by August's deadline.

Yet no one denies that Uzan's far-right nationalist Youth Party is a political threat. Support has risen in internal polls from 7% to 17% in the past eight months. A minimum of 10% is needed to win seats in parliament. Analysts attribute the spike to economic hard times — Cem is seen by many as a Turkish version of Silvio Berlusconi, an entrepreneur whose appeal lies in his business success and can-do attitude.

But anti-Western sentiment is growing in Turkey in the aftermath of the Iraq war, partly as a result of the U.S. government's harsh criticism of the country for failing to admit U.S troops. Paradoxically, Uzan's troubles with Motorola are probably helping him politically. The Motorola case "is a point of pride among his supporters," argues Arus Yumul, a sociologist at Istanbul's Bilgi University. "The fact that it was America he conned earned him points." In last November's elections, the party's slogans — "Turkey belongs to the Turks!" and "We don't need you, IMF!" — appealed to young Turks, who make up a disproportionate share of the Turkish population. They were also wooed by campaign promises of free tuition, free textbooks and free land.

And like Berlusconi, Uzan doesn't have to worry about how the media treat him. Uzan's eight television and radio stations and two newspapers allow him to get his message out without fear of critical coverage. During last year's elections he declined interviews to news outlets he didn't own. Still, Uzan insists he does not interfere with editorial decisions. "If I have five meetings and you as my opponent have one, should you have some air time? It's an editorial decision."

But it's not hard to see how Uzan's media serve his broader agenda. Last week, as the battle with Erdogan heated up, Uzan's Star tabloid ran a photograph of the Prime Minister as an earnest young man, sitting at the knee of a bearded Afghan, whom the newspaper identified — wrongly — as a "Taliban terrorist," a picture that Erdogan quickly dismissed as "insignificant."

Back in his office, Uzan rolls up his sleeves to display a rash of small scabs he says he received from well-wishers reaching out to him at a mass rally a few days earlier. "I will give up politics when the Turkish people don't want me," he says. Or presumably, if the money runs out.