North airport insists it did not make 1bn TL loss
Ercan (Tymbou) airport’s holding company T&T’s general manager Serhat Ozcelik on Thursday insisted that the airport had not made a 1 billion TL (€29.8 million) loss in 2023, after the north’s tax department had declared that it had the day before.
“We are not operating at a loss! The fact we paid no tax is the result of a legal procedure,” he said.
He said there had been “speculation among the public that our company is operating at a loss”, with that speculation having arisen from the figures issued by the north’s tax department which said they had lost exactly 1,138,517,986.86TL over the course of the year.
He added that speculation had also arisen that the company had not paid any tax during 2023 – a figure which was also released by the north’s tax department.
However, he said, the figures just appeared that way on paper due to “the company’s financial structure”.
He said T&T had in fact made an operating profit of 420m TL (€1.1m) in 2023, but that no tax had been paid as the company had recorded asset depreciation, exchange rate-losses, and investment discounts as expenses, with the company thus having “made a loss” as a “tax technique”.
In essence, therefore, his claim is that T&T over the course of the 12 months of 2023 made €1.1m, but through legal methods was able to pay no tax by spreading the cost of previous investments over to last year’s balance sheets, thus recording an on-paper €29.8m loss.
However, Ozelik also added that the idea “that our company does not contribute to public finances … is also completely contrary to the facts.”
He said the company has a revenue sharing agreement with the north’s ‘government’, and that as such, it turned over 1.6bn TL (€42m) of its revenue to the ‘government’ last year and handed over a further 286m TL (€7.5m) in the first six months of this year.
Ozcelik insisted that T&T “works as a stakeholder in our state” and that as such “its accounts must be much more transparent than all other businesses and are fully open to public inspection.”
He added, “publications which ignore this fact and aim to undermine the prestige of our business are harming not only our business but the TRNC’s investment climate and are creating an obstacle to the capital inflow needed for major investments.”
T&T’s accounts have come under fire for matters other than their tax bill, with the north’s electricity authority Kib-Tek’s workers’ trade union El-Sen leader Ahmet Tugcu having said earlier this month that the company is not paying the airport’s electricity bill.
He said T&T are only paying enough to service their debt to Kib-Tek and are still not paying their electricity bills, despite a contract having been signed between T&T, Kib-Tek and the ‘government’ to ensure that the debt be serviced, and future bills be paid.
In June, Tugcu said T&T’s debt to Kib-Tek had eached 92 million TL (€2.6m).
As a result, he said, “we are now demanding that the contract be cancelled as soon as possible, and the entire debt be collected”.
However, he said, Kib-Tek was given “political instructions” to not cut the power supply to the airport by politicians from ruling coalition parties the National Unity Party (UBP) and the Democratic Party (DP).