New inquest into businessman Guney’s death
A new inquest will be launched into the death of British Cypriot businessman Ramadan Guney following the conclusion of a court case regarding his death in the north.
The court case had been opened in 2016 – ten years after Guney’s death – with judge Nil E Celiker concluding in northern Nicosia on Friday that the forensic investigation into his death was “incomplete”.
She said Guney’s death “may have been suspicious” due to the incomplete nature of the investigation which was carried out, and the detection of ethanol in Guney’s blood.
As such, she ordered a new judicial inquest be launched and an investigation into why ethanol was present in his blood.
Guney was born in 1932 and served as an auxiliary sergeant for the British police in Cyprus, before moving to the United Kingdom in 1977.
In the UK, he founded the UK Turkish Islamic Trust and owned a building in London which was used as both a mosque and a funeral service for the city’s Turkish-speaking community.
London-based news website MyLondon said “anyone who was in north London in the 80s and 90s would have heard of Ramadan Guney, a self-made millionaire from Cyprus who was involved in multiple businesses”.
He stood as a £1 million guarantor for fellow famous Turkish Cypriot businessman Asil Nadir in 1990, after Nadir was bailed after being charged with theft in his role as chief executive of Polly Peck.
Nadir fled to Cyprus in 1993, but the courts ruled that Guney was not liable to pay the £1m because the bail had not been renewed. Guney had warned the UK’s serious fraud office in advance of his concerns that Nadir may flee the country.
Guney died in Cyprus in 2006. His son, Erkin, alleges that his death was part of a conspiracy involving “corrupt police officers” on the island who aimed to “fraudulently claim his estate”.
Erkin Guney told MyLondon in 2022 that “they injected him with 220g of ethanol which was found in the autopsy, but the people who were involved were high-ranking police officers and they lied at the inquest. They were trying to steal my dad’s estate.
“Cheques my dad had written for 300TL were altered to 300,000TL. There was also a Barclays bank cheque my father wrote in England for £460 that ended up in Cyprus as £460,000 against his estate. I proved that in court and won the case, but nobody got arrested because the police in Cyprus were involved, and this is where we’re at now.”