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The Justice and Development Party (AK Party) has destroyed two truckloads of official documents since it lost its overall majority in Parliament for the first time in 13 years in the June 7 general election, according to a report in the Taraf daily.

The report, published on Monday, claims that sources within the civil service told Taraf that, following June 7, the AK Party ordered civil servants to destroy official documents such as those pertaining to discretionary fund expenditures and documents profiling dissenters, which could implicate AK Party officials if a coalition is unable to be formed or if the AK Party falls from grace in a snap election.

The report also claims that official papers pertaining to expenditures by the Prime Ministry via the discretionary fund have been destroyed and that most of the destruction has been done in the Prime Ministry and its lower departments. In addition, the report said that mail pertaining to exceptional appointments to certain government posts by direct ministerial authorization have been destroyed to prevent any possible liability.

The AK Party has been meeting with other parliamentary political parties in what many consider to be an insincere attempt to form a coalition to govern Turkey. So far, the secular main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) has emerged as the only contender for a viable coalition government.

Taraf’s report states that the go-ahead for the eradication of documents, which the AK Party has labeled a “clean-up,” came on June 8 — one day after the AK Party lost its single-party majority but continued to command a presence within the ministries. Some of the destroyed documents are said to be concerned with the recruitment process to the civil service, in which acts of nepotism and favoritism by the AK Party were reported earlier this year. There have been claims that, when it was in power, the AK Party appointed its own partisans to public offices to ensure that the party’s brand of Islamist political ideology would become dominant within the government bureaucracy.

Even after the defeat on June 7, the AK Party has been accused of making last-minute appointments to important posts, such as appointing the deputy heads of provincial health directorates in 41 provinces to ensure an AK Party mindset in the bureaucracy. The Council of State even had to cancel a number of appointments to public institutions on the grounds that the postings were made at a time when a government has not yet been formed. It ruled recently that the appointment of the deputy directors of provincial health directorates did not serve the public good and was not considered within the scope of service requirements. The court’s decision constitutes a precedent that may have a similar effect on other appointments made recently in the absence of a new government.

Source: Zaman