Keep calm and carry on building: A guidebook for crooked contractors to trick the law

If there is one rule in Turkey, it is the unwritten law that the building of more residential complexes, energy facilities, malls, bridges and tunnels that herald development and wealth – with the niggling side effects of the deterioration of nature and social cohesion, as well as workers’ deaths due to a lack of job safety – is paramount. So construction rules and, even more so, playing without rules!

Many controversial construction projects have continued despite court orders of a stay of execution, thanks to cheap tricks – in all senses of the word – permitting contractors to bypass the law, often with the connivance of local administrations, if not the central government itself.

Both the Constitution and the Turkish Penal Code contain clear provisions sanctioning officials if they fail to implement the rulings of administrative courts.

But from the mega-constructions of Istanbul’s third bridge and third airport to the felling of trees in an olive plantation in the Aegean coal capital of Soma to pave the way to a power plant, companies have calmly adopted some easy methods to carry on building.

Loopholes in the Turkish legislation and a lack of any dissuasive penalties offer the investors and tycoons the necessary chutzpah to move on with their project by hook or by crook, egged on by the government’s huge incentives for construction. Here are the main tricks used by companies:

1-    Minor changes in master plans

Where? Urban transformation projects such as in the Istanbul neighborhoods of Sulukule and Ayvansaray, the Ağaoğlu construction company’s mega residential complex of “Maslak 1453” inside Istanbul’s Belgrade Forest, or the new presidential palace.

Pros and...