Türk Telekom has reportedly decided to dismiss 25% of its workers because of the unpaid debts of the company’s majority shareholder Oger Group

Oger Telecom, owned in partnership by Lebanon’s Hariri family and Saudi Telecom Company (STC), had bought a 55% stake in Turkey’s national telco operator Türk Telekom for $6.5 billion through the privatisation of the Turkish state’s shares in 2005 as part of the AKP government’s privatisation policy.

Oger Group has failed to make the scheduled payment on the loan, totalling $4.75 billion, which it took out in order to refinance outstanding debts for the purchase of Türk Telekom. As per a recent Cumhuriyet report, the company’s financial crisis has deepened and the workers have to pick up the cost once again.

Ömürhan Soysal, chair of the Ankara branch of Turkey’s Chamber of Electrical Engineers, announced that Türk Telekom’s Board of Directors had recently decided to reduce the number of employees. “These dismissals will be reportedly based on the justification of ‘low performance’ which isn’t grounded on any objective criteria,” said Sosyal, specifying that 25% of the staff will be laid off.

Soysal stated that the dismissals would reportedly apply to troubleshooting teams too and it had been brought forward to scale teams down to one person each.

Adding that the experienced personnel qualifying for a pension are on the top of the dismissal list, Soysal said, “Removing the experienced personnel and recruiting new employees to their positions is an obvious sign for the pursuit of cheap labour. Although the pursuit of cheap labour employment seems profitable in short term, it means a big vulnerability in the medium and long term for both Türk Telekom and our country.”

CONTROVERSIAL PRIVATISATION IN SHAMBLES

The privatisation of Türk Telekom in 2005 had marked Turkey’s largest single sell-off realised in Turkey’s privatisation history. However, the telco giant was sold for a bargain price of $6.5 billion despite the estimated auction cost being $11.85 billion, which casted a big doubt on the sale.

Moreover, after the controversial transfer of the company, Oger Group chose to pay to the Turkish state through putting the Turk Telekom shares in pledge though it wasn’t formally entitled to use the company’s shares as loan collateral. In the meantime, it paid no heed to pay its debts back to banks.

On the other hand, although both senior officials from Oger Group and then Prime Minister Tayyip Erdoğan had announced that no workers would be fired from the company, this promise wasn’t kept following the privatisation. According to a report in 2011, over 35 thousand employees had been discharged by Oger Telecom and the number of employees saw a 55% decrease.

The current situation of the unpaid debts is most likely that the Turkish state will have no choice but to acquire Oger’s stake in Türk Telecom. Should the government move to buy back Oger Telecom’s stake through one of its state institutions, this will be a major setback in the AKP government’s privatisation programme.