A Turkish gold trader at the centre of a corruption scandal that engulfed President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been arrested in Miami and charged with laundering millions of dollars.
Reza Zarrab, also known by the name Riza Sarraf, was accused in 2013 of bribing senior ministers from Turkey’s ruling party with cash and lavish gifts as part of a scheme to bypass US sanctions on Iran.
On Saturday, the 33-year-old was arrested while on holiday in Florida with his wife and daughter. The arrest was made public late on Monday night when US prosecutors unsealed an indictment that charged him with fraud, money-laundering and sanctions-busting.
The arrest threatens to reopen a case that reached right into Mr Erdogan’s inner circle and to tarnish the party that he founded. It will also deepen existing tensions between Turkey and the United States. The US attorney in charge of prosecuting the case, Preet Bharara, became an overnight sensation after tweeting that Mr Zarrab would ‘soon face American justice in a Manhattan courtroom’.
Mr Bharara was bombarded with messages of support from Turkey, where opponents of the government have increasingly turned to social media in the face of a crackdown on critical news outlets. Mr Zarrab, an Iranian-born Turkish citizen, was detained and charged in Istanbul in 2013 in a huge corruption case that posed the biggest challenge to Mr Erdogan, the man who has dominated Turkish politics for more than a decade as Prime Minister and then as President.
This post was published at TruthinGold on March 23, 2016.
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