A political ally of former Turkish Cypriot chief negotiator Kudret Ozersay was released on bail on Monday after it turned out that the signatures on documents he had allegedly forged bore the signature of his father.

Ahmet Tokatlioglu, a member of Ozersay’s party the HP’s central executive committee, had been arrested last week and stood accused of forging nine power of attorney documents over a two-day period at the start of this month.

However, with it now having turned out that the documents were in fact signed by his father, who has the legal power to sign such documents, Tokatlioglu has been released on bail following a court hearing on Monday.

He was nonetheless banned from travelling abroad and had to find an individual to sign a 500,000TL (€11,648) guarantee, as well as paying a 20,000TL (€466) bail.

Tokatlioglu outside court

He was arrested amid a deepening row between Ozersay and the north’s ruling coalition over the coalition’s handling of the north’s “fake diploma scandal”, with some commentators suggesting that his arrest may have been political in nature.

The arrest came after the HP had bought billboards across northern Nicosia and used them to criticise the committee formed to examine a request filed by the north’s chief public prosecutor’s office to lift the ‘parliamentary’ immunity of Emrah Yesilirmak, an ‘MP’ who belongs to ruling coalition party the UBP.

Three of the committee’s five members also belonged to the UBP, with the committee 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”, and thus refusing to lift his immunity.

The billboards 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.

The billboards which were placed around northern Nicosia

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 committee’s 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.

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”.