Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has blocked a government initiative announced by his son-in-law and Finance Minister Berat Albayrak to get advice from management consultancy McKinsey & Company, following opposition parties’ criticism that foreigners were being put in charge of dealing with Turkey’s financial crisis.

“I’ve told our ministers that no advisory services [from abroad] should be received,” Erdogan said in a televised speech in Ankara on October 7. “There’s no such need. We are enough for ourselves.”

Meanwhile, on October 8, Erdogan said in a speech to members of his Justice and Development party (AKP) that Turkey was not facing any worrying economic problems and would not seek assistance from the International Monetary Fund, despite its currency crisis and likely economic slowdown.

Turkey has “closed the book on the IMF, not to be opened again”, Reuters reported him as saying.

Erdogan’s move against the McKinsey arrangement came after an outcry from opposition parties, including the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), that hiring McKinsey meant the government had been forced to seek Western help in the face of its economic travails.

Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the CHP leader, last week accused Erdogan of siding with US firms at a time when there is a serious diplomatic rift with Washington, including over the detention of American pastor Andrew Brunson in Turkey and plans to buy Russian military hardware.

Albayrak said earlier in the week that anyone who did not want Turkey to work with McKinsey was “either ignorant or a traitor”.

Rather different line
But Erdogan has taken a rather different line. “This person [Kilicdaroglu] is trying to corner us by asking questions about a consultancy firm that has been paid in full to help our economic management,” Erdogan said.

“In order to not give him that chance... I told all my ministers to no longer receive consultancy from them ‘[McKinsey],” he added.

Kilicdaroglu responded on October 6 that Erdogan was forced to cancel the deal after failing to disclose the details of the agreement that he had asked for earlier in the week.

“I asked you 10 questions, told you to answer them. He read them but couldn’t handle it. He can’t answer and now he has been forced to cancel the deal,” Kilicdaroglu said.

Inflation official dismissed
Meanwhile, it emerged on October 6 that the deputy director of the Turkish Statistical Institute (TUIK) in charge of the inflation data was dismissed from his post the same day the institute announced that Turkey’s inflation had leapt to 24.5%, a level that came as a shock to the markets. The dismissal was reported by Sozcu newspaper and was later confirmed by TUIK.

Enver Tasti will be replaced by Yinal Yagan of the Energy Ministry’s Directorate of General Mining. Yagan is known to have been close to Albayrak while he served as energy minister.

Tasti’s dismissal was an unexpected decision and a move made in response to the soaring inflation figures, Sozcu reported sources as saying. Tasti was also responsible for relations between TUIK and the European Union’s Eurostat.

Mehmet Aktas has served as acting director of TUIK since February 2016, but the newspapers said the sources believed Albayrak may be lining up Yagan to replace him at a later date.

Meanwhile, Stockholm Center for Freedom reported renowned economist Professor Stephen Hanke of Johns Hopkins University as criticising Albayrak for his comments on the country’s soaring inflation. Turkey’s annual inflation rate is, in reality, 77%, according to Hanke’s calculations as of October 6.

Albayrak said on October 3 that the inflation data announced the same day proved the price effects of opportunism, stockpiling and speculative pricing in Turkey. “Finance Minister Albayrak is not only uninformed about Turkey’s inflation but clueless about its causes. He claims ‘speculative pricing’ is the cause. What a joke,” Hanke said.