Akif Beki: Why was an espionage investigation launched against İmamoğlu?
ekrem imamoglu
Columnist Akif Beki draws a direct line between the 2019 “cosmic room” saga surrounding Ekrem İmamoğlu’s election as Istanbul Mayor and the current espionage investigation, which targets his campaign manager and a prominent journalist. He questions the political motives behind the probe.
The espionage investigation launched against Ekrem İmamoğlu yesterday morning took me straight back to the past. All the way back to 2019.
As we were entering 2020, I revisited what I had written under the headline, “The ‘cosmic room’ absurdity carried over from 2019.”
Of course, at that time, I couldn’t have known that the political accusations of mistrust leveled against İmamoğlu would stretch this far, eventually morphing into an espionage probe in 2025.
When İmamoğlu first won the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality (IMM) election, he was barred from entering the municipality’s ‘cosmic room’—the IT Department—and faced outright resistance.
There was a Head of the IT Department who was quoted as saying, “I would rather give my life than give IMM data to İmamoğlu.” This was presented not as a civil disobedience scandal, but as an act of heroic resistance.
The narrative went: İmamoğlu supposedly wanted to copy secret records where the secrets of MIT, the military, and Istanbul were stored… A heroic saga, likened to the July 15 resistance, was constructed, where the heroic civil servant protected the state’s most intimate secrets from the “enemy” by refusing to surrender the password at the cost of his life.
The act of a civil servant withholding public information from the newly elected mayor, obstructing duty, defying his superior, and disobeying a legal order was perverseiy presented as a heroic defense of the homeland, rather than a scandal. Hiding the municipality’s “private laundry” from the new management was seen not as an issue but as a matter of national security.
This resistance continued until the election was rerun and İmamoğlu won again. But even after he took office, the obstruction didn’t entirely cease; it simply evolved in a different direction.
As the route of the controversial ‘Kanal Istanbul’ project was being discussed—and who had bought land along its path—news broke that the General Directorate of Land Registry and Cadastre would restrict municipalities’ access to land deed data in the new year.
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It was vital not to misunderstand the situation, though. One shouldn’t assume that information was being withheld from Istanbul residents, that covert dealings were underway, or that the identities of those who profiteered from the Kanal Istanbul project were being concealed.
Any connection to an effort to hide and protect the identities of land speculators was meant to be dismissed; the public was expected not to make that association.
This was because “troublemakers and mischief-makers” were on the prowl. They were ready to cry foul, claiming that the ban on municipalities accessing land records was a move to preempt İmamoğlu from tracking down and exposing the profiteers.
No, the official line was that the State was simply taking precautions to safeguard certain secret records that concerned municipalities, even from their own elected mayors.
One was expected not to ask: What kind of state secret are land deed records, such that a municipality’s access to them is deemed objectionable?
One was also expected not to question the logic of barring the new mayor from the ‘cosmic room’: If state secrets are kept in the municipality, where are the tender and money transaction records held? If the Mayor cannot access the records, how can the public track the spending of their taxes? Where is the transparency? And what makes a civil servant who obstructs the access of an elected mayor to municipal records more trustworthy than İmamoğlu himself? Is there a secret constitution or a bureaucratic oligarchy dictating orders outside the official chain of command?
These were all deemed flawed approaches, stemming from ill will. And now, after serving as mayor for five years and winning another election, İmamoğlu is being investigated for espionage.
Fifteen people have been detained on allegations that personal data collected via the ‘Istanbul Senin’ application was leaked to foreign intelligence agencies and used to manipulate voters during municipal elections. Among the detainees are İmamoğlu’s campaign manager, Necati Özkan, and journalist Merdan Yanardağ of TELE1.
Remembering the early days, one might think he should never have insisted on winning the IMM election and accessing the municipal ‘cosmic room.’ Look where it has brought him. And here we were, thinking the country was about to breathe a sigh of relief with the legal challenge to the CHP’s party convention now settled.
