ANKARA, July 23 (AFP) - Turkey's constitutional court Friday rejected a parliamentary decision to try former prime minister Mesut Yilmaz and another ex-minister over corruption allegations, citing procedural flaws, Anatolia news agency reported.
Legislators earlier this month voted to put Yilmaz and former economy minister Gunes Taner on trial over a 1999 banking scandal in which the mafia was allegedly involved.
Yilmaz is accused of determining in advance who should win a tender for the privatization of the state-owned Turkbank and resorting to the services of a mafia leader to scare off unwanted bidders.
The deputy head of the court, Hasim Kilic, said the judges unanimously rejected the case because parliament had decided in favor of putting the two ministers on trial in a single vote, whereas separate votes should have been held for each of them, Anatolia reported.
Citing the same procedural flaw, the court Thursday rejected a parliamentary decision to try two other former ministers accused of causing giant losses to a public bank.
Parliament may now reconsider the issues after it returns from summer recess in September.
The case against Yilmaz is part of a parliamentary investigation into alleged large-scale fraud in tenders, sell-offs, banking reforms and energy projects over the past decade that have reportedly cost Turkey billions of dollars (euros).
The Turkbank scandal surfaced when tapes of phone conversations between the businessman who obtained control of the bank and a mafia boss were leaked to the media.
It led to the collapse of Yilmaz's government after a no-confidence vote, but the center-right politician was cleared in a parliamentary investigation in 2000 and was never prosecuted.
Yilmaz left politics after his Motherland Party failed to win a single parliamentary seat in the November 2002 election which swept Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's Justice and Development Party (AKP) to power.
The current anti-corruption drive was launched by the AKP which has pledged to stamp out chronic corruption in EU-hopeful Turkey, seen by many as one of the core reasons for the economic woes that have plagued the country.