The opposition in the north has expressed anger over the decision of ‘MPs’ from ruling coalition party the UBP to refuse to lift the ‘parliamentary’ immunity of one of their own, Emrah Yesilirmak, following the filing of a request by the north’s chief public prosecutor’s office to lift it over his alleged involvement in the “fake diploma scandal”.

A report on the matter was written by a five-person ad hoc committee formed to examine the request, with the committee’s three UBP ‘MPs’ concluding that the request for Yesilirmak’s immunity to be lifted was politically motivated and writing in the report that it is “not clear or explicit which action constitutes a crime”.

In response, former Turkish Cypriot chief negotiator Kudret Ozersay decided to buy billboards across northern Nicosia.

They now read “recognise this lot! The UBP MPs who rejected the lifting of immunity in the fake diploma investigation committee”, alongside photographs of Oguzhan Hasipoglu, Hasan Kucuk and Ahmet Savasan, the committee’s three UBP members.

However, on Thursday, one of the billboards was vandalised. Ozersay, incensed, made a fresh statement on social media.

“You cannot cover up this shame by tearing up the billboards! The question is simple. If you are innocent and have not received a fake degree, why are you avoiding going to court? If your MP friend is innocent, why are you standing in the way of him having his immunity lifted?” he wrote.

He added, “if you continue like this, you will see these billboards not only in Nicosia, but in every district on this island”.

The UBP MPs who rejected the lifting of immunity in the “fake diploma investigation committee”, alongside photographs of Oguzhan Hasipoglu, Hasan Kucuk, and Ahmet Savasan

In response, Hasan Kucuk told newspaper Yeniduzen that he would go to the police and file a complaint about the vandalism, saying, “it is the police’s responsibility to find out who ripped the billboards up, using the city’s security cameras”.

“I am calling the police to do their job, and I am going to file a complaint about the person or people who tore down the billboards,” he said, before lambasting Ozersay’s insinuation that it may have been UBP associates who committed the act.

“Kudret Ozersay must prove who tore it up and what he claims. If he cannot prove it, he must go to the public and apologise. He owes it to the public … Enough is enough. It is a shame, it is a sin. We have a person before us who has already lost his moral values. There is no point discrediting the unity and solidarity of this country with such accusations and smears. He must now abandon these actions.”

Meanwhile, committee member Urun Solyali, who belongs to opposition party the CTP and voted for Yesilirmak’s immunity to be lifted, told Yeniduzen that the decision not to lift his immunity was a party-political decision.

He said that Oguzhan Hasipoglu, who is also the UBP’s secretary-general, had informed him that “we have produced a group decision” to not lift Yesilirmak’s immunity, and that earlier statements made by UBP ‘MP’ Hasan Tacoy predicting that his immunity would not be lifted had likely come following an earlier decision made within the party.

“Tacoy most likely heard it somewhere … at a time when the UBP produced a decision that it would not lift his immunity no matter what, without going into detail on the issue. This shows both disrespect for the committee’s work, and disrespect for the work that the chief public prosecutor’s office and the police have been doing for over a year,” he said.

He added, “no matter what, the group decision had already been made and they had produced the decision to build a political wall”.

Asked what political gain there would be by not lifting Yesilirmak’s immunity, he said the UBP is currently “divided into pieces”, and that as such, those at the top of the ruling coalition “do not consider offending anyone”.

The report wrote that the request for immunity to be lifted was politically motivated, and mentioned Ozersay by name, pointing out that prior to joining the UBP, Yesilirmak had been a member of Ozersay’s party the HP.

As such, the report said, Ozersay had “attempted to manipulate public opinion for political purposes” by sharing “more than a hundred posts” on social media about the authenticity or otherwise of Yesilirmak’s degree.

The UBP members also said that “if there is a claim of academic inadequacy regarding a degree, the institution which has the legal authority to determine this is, in the first place, [the north’s higher education accreditation authority] Yodak, and not the police”.

The committee’s two CTP members, Ongun Talat and Urun Solyali, argued that Yesilirmak’s immunity should have been lifted, stating that the committee’s only job was to examine whether the allegation was “serious” and whether it had political purposes.

On the former, they found that the allegations levelled against Yesilirmak were “not superficial, nor unfounded”, and that the file sent by the chief public prosecutor’s office regarding Yesilirmak included “over 21 witnesses, police reports, and comprehensive statements”.

Yesilirmak received a degree in business administration from Morphou’s now-infamous Cyprus Health and Social Sciences University (KSTU), with rumours surrounding the possibility it was forged having first surfaced in February last year.

The report made it explicit that he received a bachelor’s degree from the university’s department of business administration, which has since been suspended by Yodak, “despite not attending classes and exams”.

He has insisted throughout the last 15 months that he is innocent, and that while the KSTU may have been involved in crime, he fulfilled his obligations to receive a degree.