INSIGHTS
A guide to identifying why a Turkish account has been restricted and distinguishing MASAK transaction suspension, criminal seizure, institution-led controls and the routes by which each measure ends.
How a Turkish account or asset is actually stopped, what has to be established before it can be, and where each measure ends.
Law stated as at 1 August 2026. There is no official English translation of the Turkish provisions discussed; translations are the author’s own and the Turkish text governs.
From outside, an account affected by a money-laundering or MASAK measure looks the same whatever caused it. From inside the file there are five distinct possibilities, governed by different rules, decided by different people, and ending in different ways.
The first is the bank’s own risk decision. No public authority is involved. The institution has decided, under its internal compliance policy, that it does not wish to carry the relationship.
The second is a reporting event. The institution has filed a suspicious transaction report with MASAK, the Financial Crimes Investigation Board. A report by itself restricts nothing, but it frequently coincides with the institution restricting the relationship of its own motion.
The third is administrative suspension. A transaction has been stopped for a fixed and short period so that MASAK can analyse it.
The fourth is judicial seizure. A criminal measure has been taken over the account, the property or the receivable.
The fifth is a separate, offence-specific suspension under Article 128/A of the Code of Criminal Procedure. Since December 2025, a bank, payment service provider or crypto-asset service provider may suspend for up to forty-eight hours an account used in specified forms of cyber-enabled aggravated theft, fraud or misuse of bank or credit cards, on reasonable suspicion. The institution must notify the public prosecutor immediately and must also notify the account holder. This is a statutory criminal-procedure measure, not the institution’s private risk decision and not a MASAK suspension under Law No. 5549.
Almost every early mistake in these matters comes from treating one of these as another. The first step is therefore not to argue but to establish which of the five has occurred, and on whose decision.
Clients usually assume the institution is being unhelpful. Frequently it is not permitted to be helpful.
An institution that has filed a suspicious transaction report is prohibited by Law No. 5549 from disclosing that it has done so — to anyone, including the person the report concerns. The only exceptions are the inspectors charged with supervising compliance and the courts during proceedings. Breach of that prohibition is a criminal offence carrying one to three years’ imprisonment together with a judicial fine.
Two consequences follow. Silence from the institution is not evidence of anything; it is the statutory position. And effort spent pressing the branch, the relationship manager or the compliance department for an explanation is effort that cannot succeed.
There is a second, related feature. Those who file reports are protected from civil and criminal liability for doing so, and their identity is to be kept confidential, with the court required to take the necessary protective measures. The system is built to make reporting cheap and silent.
Records relating to identification and transactions must be kept for eight years, which is also the outer period within which an administrative fine may still be imposed for a breach of obligations.
Where a transaction is being attempted, or is already under way, and there is suspicion that the property concerned is connected with laundering or terrorist financing, the Minister — a power that may be delegated to a deputy minister — may suspend it, or refuse to permit it to proceed, for seven business days. The stated purpose is to allow MASAK to confirm the suspicion, analyse the transaction and, where appropriate, pass the result to the competent authorities.
Three features of this power matter in practice.
It is short. Seven business days is an analytical pause, not a freeze. What follows it — whether the file goes to a prosecutor, and whether a judicial measure is sought — is a separate decision under a different regime.
It reaches institutions, not just customers. An institution that executes a suspended transaction is fined the amount of the transaction, subject to a statutory minimum. That is why a bank will not, in practice, be persuaded to release a suspended payment.
And it can be triggered from abroad. The same power may be exercised on the reasoned request of a foreign counterpart financial intelligence unit, provided MASAK sees the suspicion of connection with laundering or terrorist financing and subject to reciprocity. A transaction in Türkiye (Turkey) can therefore be stopped on the initiative of a Dutch, British or Emirati FIU with no Turkish investigation in existence. Counsel abroad who are unaware of this provision tend to look for a Turkish criminal file that does not exist.
This is the point at which most accounts of the Turkish system go wrong, including some written by Turkish practitioners.
Article 128 of the Code of Criminal Procedure governs the seizure of immovables, vehicles, bank and other financial accounts, rights and receivables held against real or legal persons, negotiable instruments, shareholdings, safe-deposit box contents and other assets. It applies only to the offences listed in its second paragraph — a closed catalogue running from genocide and human trafficking through theft, robbery, breach of trust, fraud, fraudulent bankruptcy, narcotics offences, currency counterfeiting, armed criminal organisation, bid-rigging, usury, embezzlement, extortion, bribery and the offences against the security of the State and the constitutional order, together with certain offences under the firearms, banking, smuggling and cultural property legislation.
Money laundering under Article 282 of the Turkish Criminal Code is not in that catalogue.
The gateway is elsewhere. Law No. 5549 provides that where there is strong suspicion that the offence of laundering or of financing terrorism has been committed, assets may be seized according to the procedure in Article 128. The provision borrows the machinery of Article 128 without requiring the offence to be a catalogue offence.
The distinction is not academic. It means that the correct citation in a laundering file is the provision of Law No. 5549 rather than Article 128 standing alone; that an argument built on the catalogue is misdirected; and — as the next section shows — that one of Article 128’s central safeguards does not apply in the same way.
Article 128 is emphatic on this point: seizure under that article, and the appointment of a trustee under its tenth paragraph, may be ordered only by a judge.
Law No. 5549 displaces that rule in laundering and terrorist financing cases. Where delay would be prejudicial, a public prosecutor may order the seizure. The order must then be submitted to the competent judge within twenty-four hours, and the judge decides within a further twenty-four hours whether to confirm it.
Confirmation does not end the matter. Where the judge confirms, the valuation report described below must still be obtained within three months and put back before the judge. If confirmation is refused, or the report is not obtained within that period, the prosecutor’s order ceases to have effect. That consequence is written into the statute; it does not depend on an application or on the court’s discretion.
Article 17(1) of Law No. 5549 states the gateway as strong suspicion that laundering or terrorist financing has been committed, and then directs that seizure be carried out according to the procedure in Article 128. Article 128 requires strong suspicion resting on concrete evidence, and it requires it on two separate questions: that the offence which is the subject of the investigation or prosecution has been committed, and that the specific assets were obtained from that offence. The better reading is that those evidential and asset-connection requirements travel with the Article 128 procedure. The wording is not repeated in Article 17 itself, so the point should be identified as the application of the incorporated Article 128 standard rather than attributed to the text of Article 17.
The second limb is where most of the argument is, and it is routinely under-examined. A file may contain a great deal of material on the first question and almost nothing on the second beyond an inference from timing or from the identity of the account holder.
A further distinction is worth stating precisely, because it is often blurred. The assets must belong to the suspect or the accused. Where they do, seizure may be effected even though they are in the possession of someone else. That is not the same as a power over third-party assets. Property that genuinely belongs to a third party — not merely held by one — falls outside the provision, and the question of who owns it is a question of fact on which evidence can be led.
A seizure decision through the ordinary Article 128 route requires a report on the value obtained from the offence, from whichever of the following is relevant: the Banking Regulation and Supervision Agency, the Capital Markets Board, MASAK, the Treasury, or the Public Oversight, Accounting and Auditing Standards Authority. The report is a condition for the decision, not a document ordinarily supplied after the measure has already been ordered.
Under that ordinary route, the report is to be prepared within three months at the latest. Where special reasons require it, that period may be extended, on request, by a further two months.
The urgent prosecutor route in Article 17(2) of Law No. 5549 has its own rule. If the judge confirms the prosecutor’s seizure, the report must be obtained and returned to the judge within three months; if it is not, the prosecutor’s order ceases to have effect. Article 17(2) does not carry across the additional two-month extension. A timing challenge must therefore identify which route produced the operative measure before calculating the deadline.
A seizure decision over an immovable is executed by annotation on the land registry; over a vehicle, by annotation on the relevant register; over shareholdings, by immediate notification to the company and the trade registry.
Over a bank account, the decision is executed by immediate notification to the institution by technical means, followed by formal service. The statute then adds a provision worth knowing: transactions carried out on the account after the seizure decision, with a view to defeating it, are void. Attempts to move funds after service do not merely aggravate the position; they do not work.
Where the assets require management, a trustee may be appointed to administer them, with the rules governing trusteeship over companies applied by analogy. In corporate files this is often the most consequential feature of the measure, since it changes who controls the business rather than merely restricting an account.
Acting contrary to the requirements of a seizure order engages the criminal provision on misuse of a custodial duty.
Measures end in one of four ways, and it is worth being clear which is being pursued.
They lapse. The clearest example is the prosecutor’s urgent order that is not confirmed, or in respect of which the valuation report is not obtained in time.
They are lifted on application. The application is directed at the statutory conditions — the two limbs of strong suspicion resting on concrete evidence, the ownership question, the valuation, the scope of the assets covered — rather than at the merits of the underlying allegation. Refusals are subject to challenge.
They fall with the case. Where the prosecution does not proceed, or ends without a confiscation order, the basis for the measure goes with it.
Or they are overtaken. In a file that also involves a foreign proceeding, an extradition request or an INTERPOL notice, the Turkish measure is one of several moving parts and is not always the one that should be addressed first. The sequencing question is discussed in the context of red notices in Challenging INTERPOL Red Notices Originating from Türkiye.
What does not work is correspondence with the bank. The institution is executing a decision it has no power to vary.
The five measures separated at the outset of this note separate again when it comes to challenging them. A challenge addressed to the wrong authority costs time, and in these files time is not recoverable.
Suspension under Article 19/A of Law No. 5549. This is an administrative act, not a judicial one. The statute confines it to seven business days. That period does not itself open a route of appeal: when it expires the measure either falls away or is replaced by a judicial one. What matters in practice is establishing which of the two has happened, and the bank will not say.
Judicial seizure. Measures resting on a judicial decision are subject to objection under the Code of Criminal Procedure. The period is seven days, running from the point at which the decision is learned of, and it is preclusive: an objection filed out of time is refused without examination of its merits. The objection is examined not by the judgeship that made the order but by the one the Code designates next.
When the period starts is the contested point in most files. A person who finds an account unusable has usually learned that a decision exists without learning what it says. Which authority made it, on what date, and on what stated basis cannot be inferred from a banking screen — and until they are known, an objection cannot be written to the reasons.
An objection made before the basis of the measure has been seen argues against an assumed file rather than the real one. Three things determine everything that follows:
the character of the measure — administrative suspension, judicial seizure, or the two in sequence;
the authority and the date, which together fix both the deadline and the forum;
the predicate offence and the report relied on, without which proportionality cannot be argued at all.
Once those are known, the objection has something to be about. Before they are known it can only assert that the measure exists. That difference decides a good many of these applications.
Obtaining the file is work that has to be done on the Turkish record. Where the client is abroad, the practical route is set out under For Foreign Counsel; the underlying measures themselves are described at Money Laundering and MASAK Measures, and enquiries can be made through the contact page.
Because the measure depends on the offence, the offence has to be understood.
Article 282 of the Turkish Criminal Code punishes a person who takes abroad property derived from an offence carrying a minimum penalty of six months’ imprisonment or more, or who subjects such property to transactions in order to conceal its illicit origin or to create the impression that it was acquired lawfully. The sentence is three to seven years’ imprisonment together with a judicial fine of up to twenty thousand days.
Three further provisions are frequently overlooked and frequently relevant.
A separate and lesser offence, carrying two to five years, applies to a person who — without participating in the principal offence — acquires, receives, holds or uses the property knowing its character. This is the provision that reaches family members, counterparties and business partners, and it requires knowledge, which is a question of evidence rather than of association.
Where the offence is committed by a public official, or by a member of a profession in the exercise of that profession, the sentence is increased by half. Where it is committed within the activity of an organisation formed to commit offences, the sentence is doubled.
And there is a complete defence of effective remorse: a person who, before prosecution begins, secures the recovery of the property or facilitates its recovery by informing the competent authorities of its location is not sentenced for the offence. The provision is drafted in absolute terms — no penalty is imposed, rather than a reduction — but the timing condition is strict and the practical consequences of invoking it extend well beyond the laundering charge. It is not a step to be taken on a reading of the section alone.
Where a Turkish measure affects a proceeding elsewhere — an enforcement action, an insolvency, a regulatory file, a divorce — the questions a foreign court or regulator will ask are usually these: what is the legal basis of the measure, who ordered it, is it final, what would end it, and on what timetable.
Those questions can be answered from three documents: the decision itself, the notification served on the institution or the client, and the identifiers of the assets covered. Everything else is commentary.
Two points of Turkish law are worth carrying into the foreign forum. A measure taken on a prosecutor’s urgent order is provisional in a specific statutory sense and may cease to have effect without any application being made. And a suspension under Law No. 5549 is not a seizure at all, whatever the bank’s letter calls it.
This article describes the framework. It does not describe what will happen in a particular file, and the framework is not the whole of the picture.
Administrative and criminal tracks run on separate timetables and are decided by different authorities, so relief on one does not produce relief on the other. Institutions retain their own commercial discretion, and an account may remain closed after every public-law measure has ended. Where the assets sit outside Türkiye, or where a foreign authority initiated the suspension, the Turkish position is one input among several.
This article describes general procedure and does not constitute legal advice on any particular matter.
This publication is general information and does not constitute legal advice for a specific matter.