The Turkish entrepreneur always wanted to aim high. His name: Selcuk Bayraktar. Not only successful in business, but also the son-in-law of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Six years ago, his wedding to Sümeyye Erdogan, one of the daughters of the new Turkish Sultan, celebrated with 6,000 guests, made him a VIP in Istanbul’s better society.
He derives his business and profit primarily from the arms industry. The famous Bayraktar drones, successful in the Ukrainian defense against Russian bombings of cities and civilians, bear his name. The Turkish drone magnate and scion of an Istanbul entrepreneurial family posts photos and films of him in a fighter jet or in front of one of his weapons online. Born in 1979, Selcuk was trained as an engineer in Türkiye and the USA. As a doctoral student at Penn University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), he worked on autonomous drones and helicopters. In 2007, he returned to the company that his father founded in 1984 as an automotive supplier and has been Baykar’s Chief Technology Officer (CTO) ever since.
4,000 people, the average age of the workforce is 29 years, are employed there, developing and building reconnaissance and combat drones, which – as of November 2023 – have been exported to 33 countries. The TB2 combat drone achieved some notoriety, not least during the war in Ukraine. The larger TB3, which is better equipped to counter enemy electronic defenses, is about to begin production. Saudi Arabia recently ordered an entire production line worth billions of dollars for the large Akinci combat drone. Meanwhile, Bayraktar is working on an autonomously flying jet, the Kizilelma Fighter. A space rocket is also in preparation. In his ambitions, Bayraktar is not unlike people like Elon Musk.
The fast-growing manufacturer of combat drones, which Selcuk Bayraktar, as Chief Technology Officer, has rebuilt and built up over the past 20 years with his brother Haluk, who is responsible for business, currently accounts for around a quarter of the exports of the rapidly growing Turkish arms industry. According to the Turkish Exporters Association, these climbed by 27 percent to $5.5 billion last year. Just in time for the New Year, the 44-year-old passionate aviator and drone engineer has reaffirmed another top position, a position that most people try to avoid: He is his country’s largest taxpayer.
The Turkish tax authority said he paid 564 million lira in income taxes in 2022. At an average lira exchange rate, this adds up to around 34 million US dollars, around four times what Bayraktar gave to the tax authorities a year earlier. Even then he was already at the top of the Turkish taxpayers.
This is not only a sign that Erdogan’s son-in-law has earned well, but also raises questions. For example, why the tax authority is keeping secret who the second largest income tax payer is from Rahmi Koc, the aging patriarch of the industrial family of the same name, which maintains a network of industrial holdings in Türkiye that has grown over decades. Rahmi Koc is currently only ranked 7th on the relevant lists of the country’s richest people with assets of $2.3 billion. Bayraktar, the country’s largest taxpayer, doesn’t even appear there.
It can be assumed that the protected tax data was not disclosed without the consent of those affected. But it won’t hurt the reputation of the famous son-in-law if the public perceives him as an honest and big taxpayer. At least he hasn’t ruled out political ambitions, true to the motto: When the country calls me!
According to the current constitution, Erdogan himself is not allowed to run for president again. Bayraktar would not be the first Erdogan family member to hold high office: his son-in-law Berat Albayrak was Türkiye’s finance minister from 2018 to 2020.
Selcuk is a celebrity in Türkiye. His economic success with high-tech weapons makes many of his compatriots proud. He also has nothing against being co-opted by politics. He has accepted high orders from Azerbaijan and from the coup plotters in Mali, Africa, all of them his customers. In the protests against Israel’s response to the Hamas terror attack, Bayraktar was among the first prominent participants on the streets and on social media, which he likes to use to raise his public profile. Almost 3 million people follow him on the X platform (formerly Twitter). It could make sense to assume that he wants more than just being No. 1 in Türkiye when it comes to taxes.
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