A recent debate over a $ 7.9 million conditional donation transferred from the Turkish Red Crescent to an Islamist foundation has exposed a complicated web of relations with all clues leading to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his family, Ayşe Yıldırım, a columnist of Artı Gerçek news site, wrote on Saturday.

An official document showing an $8 million donation made to the Turkish Red Crescent was published by a news site this week.

The donation was made by Başkentgaz, Turkey’s second largest gas distributor in Ankara, operated by Torunlar Holding, whose owner Aziz Torun is a close friend of Erdoğan from high school.

Başkentgaz asked Kızılay to transfer $7.9 million of its donation to the Ensar Foundation, a religious organisation that provides dorms and education for children. Ensar enjoys the support of the Turkish government despite being embroiled in a child abuse scandal affecting dozens of children.

İsmail Cenk Dilberoğlu, the president of the Ensar, is a high school classmate of Erdoğan’s son Bilal Erdoğan.

Ensar Foundation announced on Thursday that the donation was later transferred to the U.S.-based Turken Foundation, which was established in the United States in 2014 to provide students with housing and scholarships and to organise cultural programmes.

The Turken Foundation was set up by Ensar and TÜRGEV, another educational foundation founded in 1996 by Erdoğan, whose daughter Esra Albayrak currently sits on its executive board.

Ensar said the funds transferred to Turken Foundation had been used for the ongoing construction of a 21-storey dormitory in Manhattan, New York City.

Erdoğan’s cousin Halil Mutlu was the former chairman of the Turken Foundation. Esra Albayrak also sits on the foundation’s executive board.

Mutlu serves as the co-chairman of the Turkish American National Steering Committee (TASC), a U.S.-based nonprofit that has for years waged public relations campaigns in support of Turkish government policies and Erdoğan.

Turkey’s main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) last year petitioned U.S. authorities for information on the sources of donations made to the Turken Foundation. The documents provided by the authorities include no records of a $7.9 million donation received in 2017 or 2018, columnist Yıldırım said, referring to CHP sources.

Some Turkish social media users have been arguing since the beginning of the week that Başkentgaz used the method of conditional transfer for tax evasion purposes.

Donors in Turkey can deduct 100 percent of a donation made to the Red Crescent from their taxable profit, while the rate of deductions that can be made for donations to other charities is 5 percent.

Yıldırım said none of the actors in that complicated web of relations had provided a satisfactory explanation for the puzzling donation transfers.

Başkentgaz and Ensar in their statements emphasised that dormitories were built for the struggle against Gülen movement, a religious group the Turkish government accuses of orchestrating a coup attempt in 2016. The movement for years had used housing facilities to recruit young students.

“Torunlar apparently evades taxes, and says it is ‘legal’. The Red Crescent serves as an intermediary for this, and says it is ‘legal’. Ensar sends the money to the United States, says it is ‘legal’. Turken Foundation says ‘We are not obliged to disclose our donors’,” Yıldırım said.

But there are many questions surrounding the donation transfer, according to Yıldırım.

The columnist asked why Torunlar Holding did not donate the money directly to Ensar, if there was no economic or legal difference between making donations to the Red Crescent or to another foundation as the company said in its statement.

“Or did (Torunlar) know that the money would be used by Turken when it used the Red Crescent as an intermediary? If it did, why did it use Ensar as the second intermediary and not TÜRGEV?” Yıldırım asked.

“Why didn’t (Torunlar) directly donate to Turken? Why did it choose such a complicated route? Were ‘taxes’ the only reason?”