ANKARA, Oct 27 (AFP) - Turkish lawmakers on Wednesday voted for a second time to send former prime minister Mesut Yilmaz and former economy minister Gunes Taner to trial on charges of corruption in a 1998 banking scandal after an earlier vote was rejected by the country's top judicial body.
Of the 444 deputies present in the 550-seat house, 419 voted in favour of putting Yilmaz on trial over the bungled privatization of state-owned Turkbank in which the mafia was allegedly involved, parliamentary sources said.
Fourteen deputies voted against the proposal, they added.
In the vote on Taner, 403 lawmakers said he should stand trial, while seven voted against the proposal.
Yilmaz, a three-time prime minister, is accused of determining in advance who should win a tender for the privatization of Turkbank and resorting to the services of a mafia leader to scare off unwanted bidders.
The 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.
The scandal 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 mafia boss involved in the scandal, Alaattin Cakici, was extradited to Turkey from Austria earlier this month to face a long list of charges, including the Turkbank affair.
The privatisation of the bank was cancelled after the scandal broke. It is now being dissolved after being seized by the state on the grounds that its weak financial structure threatened the entire banking system.
The legislature first voted to send Yilmaz and Taner to trial in July, but the constitutional court, which tries top public officials under the name of Supreme Court, rejected the move on grounds that parliament held a single vote on both men instead of two separate ones.
Citing the same procedural flaw, the court had also rejected a parliamentary decision to try former deputy prime minister Husamettin Ozkan and former economy minister Recep Onal for huge losses in a public bank they oversaw.
Lawmakers on Tuesday voted a second time to send them to court.
The case against Yilmaz and the three ex-ministers is part of a parliamentary probe 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).
10/27/2004 13:07 GMT - AFP