When the FBI raided the home of a top fundraiser for New York City Mayor Eric Adams last week, it thrust the mayor's relationship with interests in a faraway country to the core of city politics.
At the center of the suspected scandal—which has the feds reportedly probing whether authorities in Turkey funneled money to Adams’ mayoral campaign through local straw donors—is KSK Construction. And a Daily Beast investigation into KSK reveals a key piece of information: how much the company has relied on a bank under the Turkish government’s control for financial help.
It turns out that Turkiye Vakiflar Bankasi, a bank owned by the Turkish government, has underwritten KSK’s activities for years in the five boroughs—with the construction firm, its principals, and its affiliates receiving at least $14.9 million in loans from the bank. The lender has also extended KSK and its associates lines of credit worth $7.4 million.
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An operator who answered the phone at KSK—formerly called Kiska and linked to a larger Turkish infrastructure firm—initially hung up on The Daily Beast on Monday. On a second attempt, a representative for the firm declined comment before abruptly hanging up again.
According to the bank’s website, Turkey’s sovereign wealth fund controls almost three-quarters of the bank’s shares, while the country’s Ministry of Finance and Treasury holds a nearly 15 percent stake. The lender did not respond to messages The Daily Beast left through its online portal and its Manhattan office. KSK’s relationship with the bank—commonly called Vakifbank and abbreviated in most New York City Register filings as T. Vakiflar Bankasi—dates back more than a decade and has been renewed as recently as this past May, though the loans in question do not precisely align with Adams’ ascendance to City Hall.
Instead, the documents The Daily Beast uncovered show that an arm of the Turkish state has long bankrolled KSK’s activities in New York City.
Among the loans Vakifbank has proffered KSK is a $3.5 million mortgage granted to a subsidiary called MKD Group for the development of residential properties in Brooklyn in 2010, as well as $2.9 million in financing for an office complex near the borough’s waterfront that the institution extended to a different KSK affiliate, 160 Dikeman Street LLC. Filings from 2019 show that the bank had extended to KSK, via 160 Dikeman Street LLC and its titular property, a revolving line of credit valued at $5.4 million.
Vakifbank has also provided loans to companies controlled by KSK executives, managers, employees, and other people with strong ties to the firm. For example, in May of this year, Vakifbank lent $4.5 million to a company called Oily River Development to acquire another Brooklyn location. The owner of Oily River Development? KSK principal Ulgur Aydin. Additionally, one of his guarantors of that loan was a family member of his business partner in KSK, Erden Arkan, who donated $1,500 to Adams in 2021.
This isn’t the only example. Another documented Adams donor, Sertac Varol—who New York City campaign finance filings describe as a “partner” at KSK—signed documents in 2015 for a company called Citadel Development Corp to receive a half-million dollar loan from Vakifbank to acquire a property in Queens.
Varol did not respond to requests for comment from The Daily Beast, but he told news outlet The City that he did not believe he had contributed to Adams or to any other political candidate in his life.
The company has also provided loans to Aysun Kahyaoglu, a project manager at KSK, and her husband Faik and son Suleyman, who run SKF Electrical, a KSK subcontractor. The Adams campaign reported a combined $2,250 in donations from the Kahyaoglu clan during the 2021 cycle.
As of 2017, Vakifbank had tendered the family’s Kahyaoglu Development $1.5 million in direct financing and a credit line exceeding $2 million to take over three condominium units in two of KSK’s buildings, as well as the outstanding mortgage balances on the apartments a KSK affiliate owed to Bank Leumi—an Israeli lender with which company has also worked.
On top of that financing and credit line, in March 2022, Vakifbank granted the Kahyaoglus a $2 million mortgage to buy yet another Brooklyn property.
Still, the New York City Register documents do not appear to capture the full extent of Vakifbank’s support for KSK and its affiliates. State commercial code filings reflect a loan of an unspecified amount from the institution to the builder in October 2021, a month before Adams’ election. This loan is absent from the City Register documents, potentially because it was not secured against a property within the five boroughs.
Adams, for his part, has denied any wrongdoing by himself or his campaign.
“Where’s there’s smoke, there’s not always fire,” he told local TV station PIX11 in an interview on Friday.
The social media pages of the various KSK figures The Daily Beast reviewed were largely devoid of references to Adams or local New York City government affairs. Ardan and Ulgur, who has deleted his Facebook page, have both frequently posted comments online critical of ex-President Donald Trump—and, surprisingly, they’ve also been critical of Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Both repeatedly shared material supportive of the opposition Republican People’s Party, or CHP, which was founded by Kemal Ataturk.
In May 2015, Ardan shared multiple images of himself and KSK employees participating in Turkish elections, which allowed citizens living abroad to participate remotely. These included a selfie of him wearing a badge that reads, in Turkish, “Overseas District Election Board Chair.”
During his political career, Adams has taken multiple trips to Turkey—including with support from the Erdogan government and institutions close to it. He has also participated in Turkish cultural events, and even boasted of his ties to the nation. His campaign received, and then refunded, $10,000 in donations from employees of a college linked to the country in 2021.
The campaign also logged nearly $14,000 in contributions from KSK’s executives and staff, and almost $70,000 at a fundraiser Arkan organized for Adams in May 2021.
