Abdullah Bozkurt/Stockholm
A retired judge in Turkey has filed a lawsuit alleging that the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been deliberately underreporting inflation data to suppress public discontent and curb demands for higher wages and social benefits.
Seyfettin Çilesiz, a 75-year-old retired member of the Supreme Court of Appeals, filed a lawsuit against the Turkish Statistical Institute (Türkiye İstatistik Kurumu, TÜİK) on September 14, 2024, at Ankara’s 6th Administrative Court. He claims that TÜİK deliberately underreported inflation data, leading to a lower pension.
The case is still pending. If Çilesiz wins the lawsuit, his pension payments will have to be recalculated retroactively. Moreover, the ruling could set a precedent for millions of retirees to seek similar compensation while also confirming that the statistical agency intentionally manipulated inflation data to benefit the government.
The lawsuit specifically claims that TÜİK deliberately reported lower inflation figures in the first half of 2024, disregarding the actual economic conditions in Turkey. It requests the court to annul the agency’s findings and compensate the plaintiff for his financial losses.
Due to the peculiarities of the Turkish legal system, lawyers cannot initiate a class action lawsuit in this case, despite significant interest from potential claimants. Each individual affected must file their own lawsuit to seek compensation for alleged damages. However, the prospect of millions taking legal action against the agency could pressure the Erdogan government to address the issue while also causing significant embarrassment for TÜİK.
Letter from a former judge requested that the Turkish Statistical Institute disclose how it calculates inflation data. This request became the basis of a lawsuit when TUIK later refused to comply:
complaint_against_Tuik
Given the government’s control over the judiciary in Turkey, a meaningful outcome from the lawsuit is unlikely, and even if a ruling favors the plaintiff, enforcement remains doubtful. However, the legal process itself — through expert testimony, official defenses from TÜİK and court rulings — could still expose how and why the agency manipulates inflation data, revealing the weak justifications behind its actions.
Most importantly, since the case is being fought in court, it helps establish a legal precedent that could make future lawsuits easier when the rule of law is eventually restored in Turkey.
In its initial response to the lawsuit in November 2024, TÜİK urged the court to dismiss the case entirely without examining the merits. The agency defended its methodology, claiming that it surveys thousands of workplaces, analyzes rental housing units and considers 406 items across 913 categories, based on a total of 608,594 price data points, to calculate inflation.
However, TÜİK did not provide details on the contents of the inflation basket, individual item prices or their respective weights — key issues raised in the lawsuit. Instead, it falsely claimed that prices were readily available on its website, a statement that was untrue.
The plaintiff, through his legal counsel, contested TÜİK’s defense, arguing that the agency had failed to provide the necessary data. Without this information, independent experts cannot properly examine the data or determine if any foul play occurred in making the calculations.
TÜİK also feigned ignorance of the plaintiff’s request, claiming that the agency did not understand the nature of the demand and had not shared the documents and information sought in the complaint.
On March 12, 2025 the court issued an interim ruling, ordering TÜİK for the second time to provide all information and documents related to the calculation of inflation data for the first half of 2024. However, the court also asked the agency whether the requested information fell under confidentiality protections, effectively allowing TÜİK to invoke a secrecy clause if it chose to.
The plaintiff’s lawyer argued that the data did not meet the criteria for confidentiality, pointing out that TÜİK had been publishing such data for 19 years until April 2022, when it abruptly decided to cease its publication.
While the case is still ongoing, a key piece of evidence to support the lawsuit came from President Erdogan’s economy czar, Finance Minister Mehmet Şimşek, who may have inadvertently revealed how the government manipulated prices. Speaking to a business group on January 8, 2025, Şimşek publicly admitted that the government altered prices for goods included in the inflation basket.
“For products in the inflation basket that no longer have a counterpart [meaning they are no longer relevant to most consumers], we increased the revaluation rate. For products with significant weight in the inflation basket, we adjusted their prices in line with the inflation target, and in fact, even below that,” Şimşek stated.
The statistical agency operates under the mandate of Şimşek, and his statement dealt a significant blow to the credibility of the agency. His remarks were later presented as evidence in the lawsuit by the plaintiff’s lawyer, who requested that the audio recording of the minister’s speech be transcribed, analyzed by experts and included in the case file as evidence for the plaintiff.
More troubling news for TÜİK came from its former director, Birol Aydemir, who led the agency from 2011 to 2016. Aydemir, considered a veteran in the field, is regarded as the last independent director of the agency. Since his voluntary resignation, six different directors have been appointed by the Erdogan government to run TÜİK.
Aydemir was enlisted by the plaintiff’s lawyer as an expert witness in the case against TÜİK due to his extensive knowledge in the field and his past work with the agency. Aydemir served as a board member of the OECD Committee on Statistics and Statistical Policy in 2017 and as the vice chair of the Bureau of the Conference of European Statisticians (CES) from 2013 to 2015. He is highly respected as an authority both in Turkey and internationally.
TÜİK opposed the plaintiff’s motion to have Aydemir testify as an expert witness, absurdly claiming that the former head of the statistics agency lacked knowledge on such matters. The court sided with TÜİK’s demand and disallowed Aydemir’s testimony, saying the Turkish judicial system does not have a process for this — though this is not entirely true. Courts often call on expert witnesses to clarify complex issues.
Blocked from appearing in court, Aydemir submitted a written statement to the court, which was later incorporated into the case file through a motion filed by the plaintiff’s lawyer.
In his statement, Aydemir revealed that TÜİK had understated inflation data by a total of 31 percent over the past three years. He attributed this discrepancy to the growing divergence between the inflation data published by the Istanbul Chamber of Commerce (İTO) and TÜİK since May 2022, when the agency abruptly stopped publishing the average prices of individual items in the basket used to calculate inflation.
“This means that a 31 percent wage increase for civil servants and retirees was effectively blocked by TÜİK itself,” Aydemir said, considering that such payments are adjusted according to inflation data.
Aydemir, who still has access to information at the agency through his past contacts, also revealed that TÜİK’s senior management was instructed by the government to not only remove high-cost items from the inflation basket but also to modify their prices to reflect lower inflation data. “Anybody who objected to this directive was dismissed from their position,” he added.
Aydemir further stated that administrative and legal changes implemented by the Erdogan government had eroded the job security of the agency’s director, making the position more susceptible to government demands. He said President Erdogan now has the authority to dismiss the director at any time, whereas in the past, such dismissals required multiple approvals from various government leaders.
The graph shows a growing divergence in inflation data between the Istanbul Chamber of Commerce and TÜİK:
aydemir_graph_Tuik
Although the lawsuit is not expected to be successful, given the Erdogan government’s total dominance of the judiciary, it has nonetheless influenced policy to some degree. TÜİK announced an inflation rate of 5.03 percent for January 2025, the highest rate in the past 12 months.
If the court rules in favor of the agency, the lawsuit can be appealed, potentially reaching the Constitutional Court and, if necessary, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.
The court signaled its intention to protect the agency in February, when it rejected petitions from multiple organizations seeking to join the case as co-plaintiffs. These organizations included Tüm Eğitim Çalışanları Sendikası (All Education Workers’ Union), Üniversite İdari Personel Sendikası (University Administrative Staff Union), Birleşik Emekliler Sendikası (United Retirees Union) and Hekim ve Diğer Sağlık Çalışanları Kamu Sağlık ve Sosyal Hizmetler Sendikası (Doctors and Other Health Workers Public Health and Social Services Union).
Since these unions represent hundreds of thousands of retirees, education workers, administrative staff and healthcare workers, they argued that they had a direct interest in the outcome of the case. This was particularly true if TÜİK’s inflation data were proven to be understated, as it could lead to recalculations that would impact wage adjustments for their members.
However, the court rejected their request, siding with TÜİK’s motion to oppose. It argued that these organizations had no legal standing in the case, meaning the court did not recognize a direct and legitimate interest between the parties requesting to intervene and the main lawsuit.
This is not the first lawsuit filed against TÜİK for alleged manipulation of inflation statistics. In 2023 the leftist group Confederation of Revolutionary Workers’ Unions (DISK) attempted to obtain the censored inflation data from TÜİK by filing an application with the Presidential Communication Center (CİMER) under the freedom of information law.
In response, the agency refused to disclose the information, arguing that publishing the relevant data “leads to misunderstandings and misleading interpretations among the public.”
DİSK then appealed the agency’s rejection to the Information Evaluation Board (Bilgi Edinme Değerlendirme Kurulu, BEDK), a regulatory body in Turkey responsible for reviewing appeals related to access to public information. However, the board also rejected the appeal. The union then took the case to Ankara’s 6th Administrative Court, which ruled in April 2023 that the union’s right to access public information had been violated.
However, the statistical agency did not comply with the court’s decision and unsuccessfully appealed it all the way to the Council of State, the top administrative court. Although all legal avenues were exhausted, the agency has, to this day, failed to comply with the court’s ruling to disclose the details of inflation data.
These lengthy legal battles have certainly put the statistical agency in a defensive position, but they have failed to force the agency to open up its process for calculating inflation data or explain why its figures deviate from those of other organizations that report much higher inflation rates.
It is clear that the agency relies on political protection from the Erdogan government to shield itself from any negative consequences of these court battles. However, in doing so, it loses significant public trust and erodes investor confidence in the reliability of the statistical agency.
It also raises a further question: If the inflation data are underreported with modified and unrealistic inputs, as has been alleged, what other data has the agency been manipulating to present a more favorable image of the Erdogan government?
