On the morning of 27 October the Organised Crime Branch of the İstanbul Provincial Gendarmerie Command carried out operations against Bakırköy municipality in Istanbul. The Bakırköy Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office had issued detention orders for 68 people. Fifty-eight were taken. By the following day the orders had been raised to 76 and the number detained to 62. Fourteen people are still being sought.

The investigation concerns public procurement. Prosecutors say it began on tip-offs alleging that irregularities amounting to criminal offences in the municipality’s tender files for goods and services had caused loss to the public purse; that money was unlawfully demanded from business owners applying for workplace opening and operating licences; and that the applications of those who did not pay were left unprocessed. Court-appointed experts examined 42 tender files awarded by various directorates between 2024 and 2026. Investigators reviewed call records and reports from the financial crimes board, intercepted communications and conducted technical surveillance. The offences under investigation are rigging a public tender and extortion by a public official.

Among those detained are five deputy mayors — Nurcan Alan, Ali Rıza Akyüz, Cemalettin Özdemir, Arda Karadağ and Abdülhamit Pehlivan — two members of the municipal council, and a number of branch directors.

Also detained were the mayor’s 86-year-old father, Mustafa Özdemir, and her uncle, Metin Soğuksu. Neither holds office in the municipality on any account published so far, and nothing has been made public about what is alleged against either of them.

Mayor Ayşegül Özdemir Ovalıoğlu has not been detained and is not reported to be a suspect. She objected to how the operation was conducted. These were people, she said, who could have given statements whenever they were summoned; instead their doors were knocked on and they were taken away in front of their families and their children. Of her father’s detention she said: “I have never had a lawyer. I have never needed one. No one in my family has ever had a lawyer.” The municipality, she said, was still working: “We are all at our posts.”

The operation took place on the day Ovalıoğlu and several members of her council were due to resign from the CHP and join Yeni Parti — the party founded in July by Özgür Özel after a court annulled the CHP’s congress and reinstated his predecessor. Four Istanbul mayors left the CHP for Yeni Parti in that round. The coincidence of dates drew criticism, and it is set out here as a matter of record. No official document connects the two, and this post does not assert that they are connected.

A second operation was carried out the same day against Merkezefendi municipality.

What can be measured is the pattern they belong to. In its report of 22 October, the Brussels institute instituDE recorded that as at October 2026, 35 CHP mayors were in pre-trial detention — six metropolitan or provincial, including the imprisoned mayor of Istanbul, and 29 district mayors — and that 40 had been removed from office. Those figures predate both of this week’s operations.

Procurement fraud and extortion by officials are serious offences and the allegations in Bakırköy may be well founded; that is for a court to determine on evidence, and nothing here suggests otherwise. What is capable of assessment now is the method. Seventy-six detention orders were issued in a case built on expert examination of documents, call records and financial intelligence — a case, in other words, in which the evidence was already in the state’s hands before anyone’s door was knocked on. The mayor’s point was a narrow and legal one: people who would have attended when summoned were arrested at home instead.

As of this writing no court has ruled on a single one of the 62. That is the number worth waiting for.