Police find phone records of north ‘house speaker’ engaging in coercion, ‘plagiarised’ work

The Turkish Cypriot police have accessed records of telephone communications between the north’s ‘parliament speaker’ Ziya Ozturkler and officials from a university in Morphou, in which it has been alleged that he coerced them into awarding a degree under false pretences to a longtime close personal associate of the north’s ‘prime minister’ Unal Ustel.

The revelations were made at Thursday’s hearing of the trial of that close personal associate, named as Fatma Unal, by police sergeant Bilger Koral, who took to the stand as a witness.

Koral said the police found that Ozturkler had called Serdal Gunduz, the former secretary-general of Morphou’s now infamous Cyprus Health and Social Sciences University (KSTU) Serdal Gunduz, who was himself sentenced in November last year to 15 years in jail for his part in the “fake diploma scandal” over the matter.

Ozturkler, he said, had first held a telephone conversation with Unal, before immediately calling Gunduz, who then himself called the university’s student affairs office “to try to get the degree issued”.

He said that the police have now obtained more than 40 pieces of evidence in the case, including “numerous computers, hard disks, and USB drives”, with the digital evidence amounting to 500 gigabytes.

Among that digital evidence, he said, is an academic article attributed to Ozturkler, which was found on a computer belonging to Gunduz. Ozturkler’s currently used email address appeared on the document.

He said that there is a “suspicion of plagiarism” regarding the article, but that “no definitive determination has yet been made on this matter”.

Away from court, Turkish Cypriot leader Tufan Erhurman was asked during an appearance on Kibris Postasi TV to comment on the matter, and while he refused to be drawn into saying whether or not Ozturkler should resign, he did go as far as saying that “this issue needs to be resolved as soon as possible, otherwise serious problems will arise”.

He had said on Monday that he would discuss the issue of Ozturkler at his bi-weekly meeting with Ustel on Tuesday, and that “I am of the opinion that the attitudes which should have been taken regarding these developments has not been taken”, though neither Erhurman nor Ustel made public comments after Tuesday’s meeting.

Meanwhile, opposition party CTP leader Sila Usar Incirli held a meeting with Turkish Cypriot police chief Ali Adalier on Thursday afternoon to discuss the matter, and said after that meeting that she is “deeply disturbed by the fact that politics is being associated with corruption and malpractice in this way”.

She confirmed that Adalier had offered her “information regarding the ongoing process”, and said that the police are “approaching these issues with sensitivity”.

“We do not want or accept that people in positions of power are involved in corruption and irregularities. These situations must be prevented, and we must get rid of them immediately,” she said.

She then called on Ozturkler and Ustel to “fulfil their political responsibilities – in other words, resign” in light of the allegations.

Ozturkler had been reported to the police by former Turkish Cypriot chief negotiator Kudret Ozersay last week after the allegations against him were made in a prior hearing of Unal’s trial.

It has since been alleged that he not only coerced university employees into handing out degree certificates under false pretences, but that he gifted ‘TRNC’ citizenship to those he coerced after the fact.

He denies the accusations, and asked the legislature last week , “are we going to act based on the reputation of someone who received a 15-year jail sentence and has been convicted on hundreds of counts?”.

During that session, multiple ‘MPs’ called on him to resign, with the CTP’s Dogus Derya labelling him a “liar” and a “fraud”.

It was during that same session that Derya had made reference to accusations printed in some media outlets in recent years that Ozturkler had plagiarised part of his own doctorate thesis.

“You are creating the impression that someone came out of the sky and slandered you. However, since you did nothing regarding the accusations of plagiarism which were reported in the newspapers, this suspicion is reasonable,” she told him at the time.

She also described Ozturkler as “a person who exploited the academic process and failed to take the necessary actions, who is therefore tainted with suspicion”, before returning to accusations she had made in 2024 that he had been given an envelope stuffed with cash by the City Island University’s owner Talip Emiroglu in a restaurant car park.