ANKARA, July 4: Turkey’s ruling party on Friday appeared to have launched allout war on one of the country’s richest and most controversial families — seizing banks and power utilities and gagging its television stations — in what some see as a bid to block a potential political rival.

The family is the Uzan clan, whose eldest son, 42-year-old media baron Cem Uzan, was the dark horse in the Nov 3 election that brought the Justice and Development Party (AKP) to power.

In that vote, Mr Uzan’s right-wing Youth Party came out of nowhere to grab the headlines and touch a popular nerve although it fell short of the 10 percent needed to enter parliament.

But it has lurked in the background as a political threat to 49-year-old Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s AKP, fanning nationalist rhetoric and accusing the International Monetary Fund of “sucking the blood out of Turkey” with its unpopular program to help the EU hopeful battle chronic inflation.

On Friday, Turkey’s independent banking regulators seized control of one of the Uzan group’s banks, Imar Bankasi, saying “continuation of its current activities presented a danger for the security and stability of the financial system.”

The bank, which analysts have called less than transparent, has been controlled since 1984 by the Uzan family based in Istanbul, the country’s economic capital. It has 169 branches, employs 1,500 people and deals mainly with foreign exchange operations.

The bank caught attention with an ad campaign promising the highest interest rates on foreign currency deposits, but press reports said major debts mounted up and it could no longer manage matters.

It reported losses of some 65 million euros (74 million dollars) in 2002.

The Uzan family is no stranger to controversy. It also operates two power utilities the government took control of last month, and was taken to court this year by US mobile phone giant Motorola that claimed the Uzan mobile phone operator Telsim defrauded it of billions of dollars.

The crackdown against the group comes as Cem’s Youth Party has started climbing in opinion polls.

Although it failed to get any members in parliament with only seven percent of the vote, it now boasts 17 percent support in opinion polls — and is seen as the strongest challenger to Erdogan’s party.

Erdogan meanwhile has gone on the offensive, filing lawsuits against Cem Uzan for slander over harsh remarks he made at a rally in mid-June after Ankara decided to take over his power utilities.

The government reclaimed control of two Uzan-owned power utilities after the companies refused to transfer some distribution rights to the state as demanded by law.

“You are a treacherous man. What sort of a Muslim are you? You have become an infidel,” Uzan said of Erdogan.

Turkey’s broadcasting watchdog meanwhile tightened the screws Thursday by ordering five Uzan-owned television channels off the air for a month after the stations were used to repeatedly attack the prime minister.

Deputy Prime Minister Abdullatif Sener has categorically denied any political “influence” in the government’s action against the Uzan group.

But the Uzan family’s tabloid paper Star on Friday bitterly denounced what it called an “ignoble political plot”.

“Tayyip Erdogan is trying to annihilate his political rival Cem Uzan,” the paper wrote.—AFP