Purges Are Bad for Business in Erdogan’s Battered Economy
- More than 100,000 have been fired, jailed or had assets seized
- Fear saps demand as economy shrinks for first time since 2009
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The lights are off and the machinery is silent, most of the workers sent home for what may be forever. It only took two months for the government of Turkey to run this peanut plant into the ground.
Not long ago, the Baspinar family factory in the fertile region near Syria was being hailed on state television as a model of Turkish entrepreneurship. Enes Baspinar, the company’s celebrated 41-year-old former general director, had been one of the country’s largest suppliers of roasted peanuts and was about to enter the German market for peanut oil, freshly printed labels ready to go.