Terrorism and Criminal Organisation Accusations
The claim that money gushed out of the safe in the password-protected room
Out of context
Claim
Fact
This claim belongs to the day after the Furkan Foundation operation carried out in Adana on the morning of 30 January 2018. There was a confidentiality order on the investigation; even so, on 31 January 2018 reports headlined "money gushed out of the password-protected room" were published.
It is true that there was money in the safe. What the report did not write is this:
- The money was in the foundation's own safe. It came out of no one's home, off no one's person and out of no one's personal account.
- Under its founding deed the Furkan Foundation holds the authority to collect donations; the money in the safe is donation income collected in that way.
- There are receipts for the money. The police seized the receipts in that same search; the receipt copies left with the people who made donations were also submitted to the court at the first hearing.
- The report's headline says "password-protected rooms"; its own standfirst states that the same place is the system room. The place entered with a password is the room where the servers stand.
The amount too has been cut off from its context. 350,000 lira was, at that date, a sum not even enough to establish a foundation; the headline, with the verb "gush", presents it as though it were a fortune.
For the continuation of the same wave of reports: the claim of a "3-million-lira racket with fake receipts".
Why this label, "Out of context"?
Because the concrete information in the report — that money was found in a safe, in a locked room — is true. We do not deny it.
But this is not a fault. For receipted donation money to be in the safe of an institution authorised to collect donations is what ought to be. There is nothing more ordinary than a foundation's money sitting in the foundation's safe. The claim has loaded an ordinary finding with a meaning that does not belong to it.
What did the report say?
The day after the operation of 30 January 2018, at 12:06 on 31 January 2018, a report went out under this headline: "Money Gushed from the Password-Protected Rooms in the Raided Furkan Foundation". The standfirst stated that the number of people taken into custody had risen to 25, that the system room of the foundation's headquarters building could be entered with special passwords, and that 350,000 lira had come out of a safe found there.
Where was the password-protected room?
The first sentence refuting the report lies inside the report itself. The phrase "rooms entered with special passwords" calls a hidden compartment to mind; the text itself says that the place was the system room. Keeping the room in which an institution's servers stand behind a password is not a security gap but a security requirement. The same practice exists in thousands of institutions, and in none of them does it become news.
The safe is just as ordinary. An institution that takes cash donations, holds charity bazaars and runs aid campaigns has a safe; not having one would be odd. The report, however, presents the safe as a finding and, with the verb "gushed", tries to make the amount look uncountable. Yet the sum is written in the report's own text: 350,000 lira. Money that can be counted and written down in a single sentence is not money that gushes.
What was the money in the safe?
The Furkan Foundation was established on 22 November 1994, and in its founding deed collecting donations and holding charity bazaars are expressly listed among its sources of income. Like every foundation and association in Turkey, its survival depends on this income; institutions working in the Islamic field are given no state support.
The money in the safe is these donations, and it was taken against official receipts. What became of the receipts is the strangest detail in the file: in the search of 30 January 2018 the police seized the receipts. That is, the documents showing that the money was recorded were already in the hands of the investigation at the very time it was being reported as "unrecorded money". The receipt copies left in the donors' stub books were also submitted to the court by the lawyers at the first hearing.
As of 6 August 2019, that is a year and a half after the operation, neither the receipts seized by the police nor the receipt copies submitted to the court had been examined. In the MASAK report in the same file, meanwhile, no increase whose source could not be explained had been found in the account movements of the people on trial.
Why did the figure grow?
350,000 lira is a sum not even enough to establish a foundation, and the public found this report laughable on the day it appeared. After that the figure was raised: on 27 February 2018 a "3-million-lira racket with fake receipts", and after the operation of 7 May 2018 people began to speak of 80 million lira.
What is striking is that as the figure grew the documentation shrank. The great majority of the media gave no place at all to the last claim. Most of the foundation's buildings are rented; had there been a resource of the alleged size, property would have been acquired.
One more question
There was a confidentiality order on the investigation file. Even so, the amount that came out of the safe appeared the same day in every newspaper; the receipts found in that same search appeared in none of them. Leaking part of the information and concealing the other is the description of a constructed story, not of journalism.
The information on this page belongs to the operation of 30 January 2018 and the 2018–2019 file that followed it. It should not be confused with another, ongoing judicial process.