ANKARA - The supreme court trial of former Turkish prime minister Mesut Yilmaz was adjourned until April 15 Thursday after the second hearing into a banking scandal which brought down his government in 1998.
Yilmaz, a three-time prime minister and former chairman of the centre-right Motherland Party (ANAP), and his former economy minister Gunes Taner, risk up to ten years in jail if found guilty of fraud in the bungled 1998 privatisation of the state-run Turkbank.
The pair are on trial after the parliament, dominated by the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), voted to send them to court following a lengthy house inquiry into corruption allegations in the last decade.
Yilmaz has denied that he rigged Turkbank's privatisation for a pre-determined winner and argued he was unaware that an underworld figure had intervened in the process to scare off other bidders.
At the first hearing before the 11-judge panel in February the defense presented the court with their arguments on what they considered procedural mistakes in the trial.
The Supreme court called on eight witnesses Thursday, most notably the former head of the treasury Yener Dincmen, who said he had not been solicited by the two defendants in the case ahead of the attempted privatisation.
The trial is set to continue for months but the decisions of the Supreme Court -- the name under which the Constitutional Court, Turkey's top tribunal, judges senior public officials -- are irrevocable.
The Turkbank affair led to a no-confidence vote and the collapse of the government led by Yilmaz, who was cleared in a first parliamentary investigation in 2000 and never prosecuted.
The Turkbank sell-off was cancelled after the scandal and the bank is now in the process of being dissolved.
03/24/2005 17:48 GMT