Export Fraud, Money Laundering and MASAK: Court of Cassation Ruling

A foreign company is looking for a factory in Türkiye to supply food to its own country's army. A bilingual intermediary helps the owner, who does not speak Turkish; factories are visited and part of the first orders is delivered. As the advance payments grow, deliveries stop, and delaying tactics begin with reasons such as an earthquake, the mafia and murdered customers. In the end, for a total of USD 2,832,352, neither goods nor money arrive. The public prosecutor's office treats the matter as a "legal dispute arising from breach of contract" and decides there is no ground to prosecute. The question the Court of Cassation answered is this: in a commercial relationship worth millions of dollars, with allegations of laundering and front companies, can the conclusion "legal dispute" be reached without having the documents translated and without examining the accounts?

By its decision of 3 November 2025, Docket No. E.2025/2838, Decision No. K.2025/13724, the 11th Criminal Chamber of the Court of Cassation set aside, at the request of the Ministry of Justice and by unanimous vote, in the interest of the law, the decision of the Samsun 3rd Criminal Judgeship of Peace rejecting the objection.

🌍 The Picture Described in the Complaint

According to the complaint reported in the request for reversal in the interest of the law set out in the decision, difficulties arose in food supply because of the economic, political and military crisis in Lebanon, and various contracts worth USD 50 million were signed between the complainant company and the Lebanese Army. Under these contracts, products such as flour, oil, pasta sauce, sardines and green peas were to be exported from Türkiye.

While looking for goods on the Turkish market, the company owner came into contact with a suspect who is both a Turkish and a Lebanese citizen. This person said that, as a truck driver, he had direct links with many factory owners and that, if he was paid a commission, he would introduce factories able to meet the need. Because the company owner did not speak Turkish, communication ran entirely through this intermediary.

According to the complaint, the suspects used certain food companies in Hatay, Samsun and Mersin to claim factories and goods that did not in fact belong to them and so created an atmosphere of trust. It was also alleged that one of the suspects carried out the transactions while hiding behind a company that in fact belonged to his wife.

💵 The Commercial Relationship in Figures

The amounts in the decision also explain why the matter could look like a simple "undelivered order". Part of the trade did actually take place:

According to the complainant, the suspects cut the money in the company accounts off from its source by transferring it to third parties and withdrawing cash; in the enforcement proceedings that were started, no assets could be found in the company accounts. It was also alleged that the suspects were wanted by INTERPOL and that arrest warrants existed against them.

📁 The Prosecutor's Reasoning and the Rejection of the Objection

The Samsun Chief Public Prosecutor's Office (9 December 2024, Investigation 2023/55422, Decision 2024/30457) decided there was no ground to prosecute, stating that the matter was a dispute of a legal nature based on one of two parties to a mutual agreement not performing, or only partly performing, its obligation, that the complainant could make good the loss through the civil courts, and that the statutory elements of the offence of fraud had not arisen.

The Samsun 3rd Criminal Judgeship of Peace (27 February 2025, 2025/1615 Misc.) rejected the objection to this decision. The decision, which is final under Article 271/4 of the Code of Criminal Procedure (CMK), became final on the same date. The Ministry of Justice requested a reversal in the interest of the law on 26 May 2025, and the Chief Public Prosecutor's Office at the Court of Cassation sent the file to the Chamber with its written opinion of 16 June 2025.

⚖️ Court of Cassation: Investigate First, Characterise Afterwards

The Chamber based its decision on Articles 160, 172 and 173 of the CMK. The framework stressed in the reasoning is as follows: as soon as a public prosecutor learns of a situation giving the impression that an offence has been committed, he or she begins investigating the truth of the matter and collects evidence both for and against the suspect. The criminal judgeship of peace, when reviewing on objection a decision not to prosecute, may reject the objection if there is insufficient evidence, may accept it if there is sufficient evidence, or may decide that the investigation be widened because it was incomplete.

In the case at hand, the Chamber found less that the prosecutor's conclusion of "legal dispute" was wrong in itself than that this conclusion was reached without sufficient investigation. In the words of the decision, rejecting the objection, instead of widening the investigation, against a decision not to prosecute given "as a result of faulty reasoning and an incomplete investigation" is contrary to the Law.

🗂️ Steps Requested in the Investigation

The most concrete part of the decision is the list of investigative steps set out by the Chamber. They also show which evidence may be decisive in fraud allegations that take the form of an international commercial relationship:

The request for reversal in the interest of the law also asked for the collection of the undertakings said to have been submitted to the Turkish Embassy in Beirut and the Lebanese Embassy, and of the companies' documents such as customs declarations, delivery notes, invoices, collection receipts and computer records.

🔁 Why Does the Laundering Allegation Matter?

The complainant alleged that the suspects also committed the offence of laundering proceeds of crime regulated in Article 282 of the Turkish Penal Code (TCK). According to the text of the legislation, Article 282/1 punishes a person who takes abroad assets derived from an offence carrying a minimum penalty of six months' imprisonment or more, or who subjects them to various transactions in order to conceal their unlawful source or to give the impression that they were lawfully acquired, with imprisonment from three to seven years and a judicial fine of up to twenty thousand days.

Laundering depends on the existence of a predicate offence. If a fraud allegation is closed as a "legal dispute" without investigation, the allegation that the money was circulated through front company accounts by cash, transfers and currency exchange is not examined at all. That is why it matters that the Court of Cassation listed the review of bank account movements and a MASAK report: the trail of the money flow is evidence that may show both whether fraudulent intent existed from the start and the basis of the laundering allegation. Another decision on how the link between the predicate offence and laundering must be established in an indictment is discussed in the article on the predicate offence link in launderingTR.

Another point of note in the decision is that partial performance does not automatically lead to a result in the suspects' favour. According to the complainant, the actual delivery of products worth millions of dollars is part of building trust. Whether the deliveries were made for that purpose or whether a genuine commercial relationship was broken later can be understood only by examining the books, invoices and account movements.

🆕 Note on Current Legislation

In the text of Article 173/1 of the CMK as quoted in the decision, the objection period appears as "fifteen days". In the current text in the Legislation Information System, this period is two weeks from notification of the decision not to prosecute. The rest of the paragraph, that is, the rule that the objection is made to the criminal judgeship of peace in the place where the assize court within the jurisdiction of the public prosecutor who gave the decision is located, is the same.

In addition, the fourth paragraph added to Article 158 of the TCK by Article 13 of Law No. 7589 of 16 July 2026 provides for a reduction of the penalty by half where participation in fraud offences is limited to giving another person information or tools that enable the use of an account at a bank, brokerage firm, payment service provider or crypto-asset service provider. In cases where the money is alleged to have been moved to third-party accounts, the role of the account holders may need to be assessed separately in light of this new provision.

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