Getting Seized Money Released in Türkiye: the CMK 131 request, and your route when it is refused

Before anything is drafted, establish which provision the freeze rests on. It decides who you write to and what you have to show.

Most account freezes in an economic-crime file are made under CMK 128. It reaches bank and other financial-institution accounts of every kind, rights and receivables held by third parties, safe-deposit contents, shareholdings and other assets, and it requires strong grounds of suspicion resting on concrete evidence both that the offence was committed and that the asset came from it. Two features matter to you. CMK 128/9 reserves the decision to a judge — a prosecutor cannot order it and neither can the police. And CMK 128/2 sets a closed list of offences it may be used for: fraud (TCK 157 and 158), theft (141, 142), breach of trust (155), fraudulent bankruptcy (161), usury (241), drug manufacture and trafficking (188), and the imprisonment-carrying offences of the Anti-Smuggling Law are among them. CMK 128/1 also requires a report on the value derived from the offence from the competent authority — BDDK, the Capital Markets Board, MASAK, the Treasury or the KGK — prepared within three months and extendable by two further months on request.

A faster mechanism now sits beside it. Under CMK 128/A a bank, payment service provider or crypto-asset service provider may itself suspend an account for up to forty-eight hours where there is reasonable suspicion of aggravated theft (TCK 142/2-e), aggravated fraud (158/1-f and 158/1-l) or misuse of bank or credit cards (245). The institution must report the suspension to the prosecutor immediately and notify you; you may apply to the prosecutor to have it lifted, and the prosecutor decides within twenty-four hours. If the funds are then seized without a judge's decision, the seizure goes to the duty judge within twenty-four hours and the judge must announce a decision within forty-eight hours of the seizure itself. If that does not happen, the seizure lapses of its own accord.

Obtain the decision and the seizure record before you argue anything. They are read the same way as any other search and seizure in a Turkish investigation: what offence is named, what asset is described, and on whose signature.

CMK 131 is two sentences long and it gives two alternative grounds. Property seized from a suspect, an accused or a third party is returned where keeping it is no longer necessary for the investigation or the prosecution, or where it is understood that it will not be subject to confiscation. Either ground stands on its own. You do not have to prove your innocence to succeed on the first, and you do not have to wait for a verdict to succeed on the second.

Who decides depends on the stage, and more than one door is open:

What carries a request of this kind is documentary provenance, not argument: payroll and tax records, the sale contract, the invoices behind the counterparty payments, statements showing the balance existed before the conduct alleged. Where the frozen sum is only part of the account, say so and ask for release of the untainted remainder; a freeze that is broader than the value stated in the CMK 128/1 report is worth naming as such.

One provision cuts the other way. CMK 131/2 says that assets seized under CMK 128 which belong to the victim of the offence, and are no longer needed as evidence, are returned to that owner — not to the account holder. In files built around a Turkish money laundering investigation under TCK 282 the frozen sum is very often traced to a predicate offence with an identified complainant, and that is where a return request most often fails.

CMK 131/1 closes with the sentence that keeps the matter alive: decisions refusing the request may be objected to. The procedure is CMK 268. The objection is made within two weeks of the day the person concerned learned of the decision, reckoned in accordance with CMK 35, by a petition filed with the very authority that made the decision, or by a statement recorded by the clerk. That authority may correct its own decision; if it does not, CMK 268/2 requires it to send the file on to the reviewing body within three days at most.

The reviewing body is fixed by CMK 268/3. A decision of a criminal judgeship of peace goes to the next-numbered judgeship in the same courthouse, the last-numbered judgeship's decisions going to number one; where a single judgeship sits at a place with no ağır ceza mahkemesi, the file travels to the judgeship at the seat of the ağır ceza mahkemesi in whose jurisdiction it sits, and where the single judgeship sits at a place that has its own ağır ceza mahkemesi, the file goes to the judgeship at the seat of the nearest other ağır ceza mahkemesi. A decision of a single-judge criminal court of first instance goes to the ağır ceza mahkemesi in whose jurisdiction it sits. Under CMK 271 the objection is decided on the papers without a hearing, as soon as possible, and the reviewing body's decision is final.

Some sums are beyond the reach of CMK 131 and it is better to know it early. TCK 55/1 requires confiscation of material benefits obtained through the offence, of the object of the offence, and of the economic gains produced by converting or investing them; that confiscation is displaced only where the benefit can be returned to the victim. Where the prosecution's case is that the balance is the proceeds, the second ground of CMK 131 is unavailable and the argument has to be that the money predates or is unconnected to the alleged conduct.

Delay carries its own risk. CMK 132 allows seized property to be disposed of before the judgment becomes final where it faces damage or a substantial loss of value; the decision belongs to a judge during investigation and to the court at trial, and the owner must be heard beforehand and notified of the outcome. CMK 132/6 works the other way for you: where the item is no longer needed as evidence, it may be handed over against immediate payment of its market value, with confiscation then attaching to that value instead of the thing itself.

If the freeze should never have been imposed, CMK 141/1-j gives a compensation claim against the State for property or other assets seized where the statutory conditions were not met, not kept safe, used for purposes outside the case, or not returned in time. CMK 142/1 sets the window: three months from service of the finalised decision, and in any event one year from the date it became final. The claim goes to the ağır ceza mahkemesi where you live (142/2), is decided at a hearing, and the outcome can be taken to istinaf (142/8).

A frozen account rarely arrives alone. It usually comes with a travel restriction, a summons and a file you cannot read, which is the wider ground covered in our note on frozen accounts and economic crime investigations in Türkiye.