Turkish Aeronautical Association to sell 12 ambulance helicopters at loss of €80M

Duvar English

The Turkish Aeronautical Association (THK), under the management of a board of trustees for the past four years, plans to sell 12 ambulance helicopters, which have been leased to the Health Ministry oover several years and were originally procured for 100 million euros.

The sale is aimed at facilitating debt payments and will be conducted at a price of 19.7 million euros, according to reporting of daily BirGün.

Since the trustee committee took over the THK, the board has been selling the assets of the 98 year-old institution and placing names close to the government in various branches.

An Ankara Civil Court of Peace approved the sale decision of the trustee board, which stated that the institution would enter an economically troubled period if the sale of the helicopters was not realized.

When the government was criticised for not using THK's fire extinguishing planes in the fires that broke out in 2019, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said that THK was run by the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) and had turned into a "graveyard.”

Shortly afterwards, a trustee board was appointed to the institution until a new general assembly meeting was held on the grounds that there were not enough members in the board of directors.

The court, which had appointed a trustee to THK, had decided that the organization would hold a general assembly in November and that the organization would be governed by the names elected by the votes of the delegates.

The trustee committee applied to the court and asked for permission to postpone the general assembly, and claimed, "The next administration would not be able to solve the problems of the institution and the gains made during the trustee period would be wasted."

Although the court has not yet made a decision on this request, it is also known that Ali Yüksel, board of trustees chair, is preparing to run. Yüksel was one of the figures close to former Interior Minister Süleyman Soylu.

Sources within the THK say that the trustees' main reason for postponing the elections is that they have not yet reached a sufficient number of delegates to win the elections.

The former THK management, on the other hand, stated that the future targets of the trustees are the most valuable property of the institution, the hotel in Istanbul’s Laleli district worth billions of liras, and the extinguishing aircraft.