“A growing political scandal in Turkey threatens to involve the country’s prime minister, a key player in a program to purchase $4 billion worth of iPads for thousands of schools, which in turn was a major motive for Apple’s plans to open a retail store in the country early next year,” Gary Allen reports for ifoAppleStore. “Three ministers resigned Christmas night in the face of corruption allegations, and they called on prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan to also resign. If Erdogan does leave office, it could put the iPad deal in jeopardy, and leave the nearly-finished and high-profile Apple store with vastly fewer customers.”
“It was Erdogan who visited Apple’s headquarters last year, reportedly to negotiate the purchase of 12 million iPads for the country’s schools,” Allen reports. “It’s believed that as part of the iPad purchase agreement, the company also agreed to open a retail store in Istanbul, despite the country’s minuscule market share for Apple products. CEO Tim Cook will reportedly fly to Turkey next February to finalize the iPad deal with Turkish officials.”
Read more in the full article here.
Related article:
Rumor: Tim Cook to discuss $4 billion iPad in schools deal with Turkish president – December 24, 2013
whoops….
you lay down with dogs – or politicians – and you get up with fleas…
What’s the scandal?
It’s perfectly legitimate for Apple to open a store (they do a lot of repairs at Apple stores) to support such a program.
A scandal would be that the son of the prime minister was promised a job there or the prime minister owns the real estate where the store is to be located. But the article doesn’t provide background on the nature of the scandal, only that Turkey has a low OS X installed base.
Big deals like this always take a long time to arrange. This would be a major deal. Put in context, $4B is 0.4% of Turkey’s GDP. A change in gov’t would scupper the deal.
MDN: Mention “Turkey” in the article title!
first 2012 must have been disappointed when he clicked on the story
If this is what they call corruption, we need to have them visit American politicians and see what corruption is really all about.
And it’s the children that will loose.
Loosen the collar, lose the shirt. English written here.
I have a cold, that’s my excuse for the typo.
The message is the same.
Write hear, sum fine know knead two right the wright whirred.
That’s the problem. Without the communication clarity manifested by proper grammar and spelling, the message is NOT the same.
U no?
(But I like your excuse. 🙂 )
Heck, we would say “good job” to getting an Apple Store brought in. We”do call it creating jobs.
This deal has been in process for several years. I remember reading a couple of years ago about Turkey requiring a percentage of domestic production as part of the deal. They’re not looking to spend $4 billion, they’re just trying to get money moving around so some can be skimmed off. The scheme must have come apart somewhere, possibly because someone thought their cut was too small and just blew the whistle.
It figures. It certainly was a deal to good to be true. Par for the course for Tim Cook. In a somewhat similar deal Motorola and Nokia had also gotten involved with the Uzan Clan and Telsim Communications in Turkey back around 2002-2004 and Motorola and Nokia got stiffed out of about $4 billion dollars. As soon as I heard it was Turkey, I figured it was going to go bad for Apple. Turkey is just filled with crooks trying to pass themselves off as legitimate businessmen. Might as well forget about those iPads for education.
Well said, Turkey is a corrupt country full of thieves 👿👿
The original scandal had nothing to do with Apple. It involves graft, bribery, money laundering, smuggling from Iran, and other fun things. The secondary scandal is that hundreds of the cops investigating the corruption have been relieved of duty or transferred elsewhere. If true, this is corruption on a grand scale.
Turkey and corruption surely not. I wondered why my Levi jeans, had a misspelt label and finished 6 inches above my ankles and my Rolex cost less than a Timex and seemed to have but a passing relationship with the concept of time. Silly me.
That’s strange, all of the knock-offs I buy in Turkey are pretty high quality,