London: Akin Ipek, one of Turkey's richest men, was staying in the Park Tower Hotel in London when the police raided his television network in Istanbul. The raid was national news, so Ipek opened his laptop and watched an unnerving spectacle: an attack on his multibillion-dollar empire, in real time.

Through a combination of shouting and persuasion, the network's news editor convinced the officers that they should leave, then locked himself in the basement control room with a film crew. For the next 7½ hours, until the police returned, the news editor spoke into a camera and took calls on his iPhone. One was from Ipek, who denounced the government's action as illegal.

"I was shocked and angry," Ipek said in a recent interview in London. "But I thought they would leave after a couple days. There was no reason to stay."

Actually, the government never left, and the events were the start of a personal cataclysm for Ipek. His station, Bugun TV, was taken off air a few hours after that phone call, on October 28, 2015. His entire conglomerate of 22 companies, Koza Ipek, is now owned and operated by the state.

The episode proved to be a dry run for a nationwide series of confiscations that began soon after a failed attempt to overthrow the government of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on July 15 last year.

Since then, more than 950 companies have been expropriated, all of them purportedly linked to Fethullah Gulen, the Muslim cleric who Turkish leaders say masterminded the putsch.

About $US11 billion ($13.9 billion) worth of corporate assets - from small baklava chains to large publicly traded conglomerates - have been grabbed by the government, a systematic taking with few precedents in modern economic history. Several thousand dispossessed executives have fled overseas. The less fortunate were imprisoned.

Soon after the raid, a warrant was issued for Ipek's arrest, stating that he laundered vast sums for what officials call the Fethullah Terrorist Organisation (or FETO). His assets were frozen and have gradually been seized, starting last year with his luxury cars and ending with all of his real estate and bank accounts. Prosecutors announced in June that they would seek a 77-year prison sentence for Ipek, though he has no plans to return to Turkey.

Settled in London, Ipek spends his days trying to clear his name and somehow reclaim his life. He says he is not a financial backer of Gulen or a beneficiary of favours from his followers. And, he says, he didn't flee Turkey with billions of dollars, as the government has charged. He says his current net worth is less than $US10 million.

"I have not committed one single crime in my life, not a traffic penalty," he fumed.

'An Exceptional Person'

A fit-looking 53-year-old, Ipek speaks English learned, in part, as an undergraduate in Britain. A black belt in taekwondo and formerly an exercise addict, he has given up workouts since moving to London and has a pack-a-day cigarette habit. He shaved off the moustache he long wore in Turkey, an act with political overtones given that moustaches are de rigueur in Erdogan's Justice and Development Party, shortened to AKP in Turkey.

"They copied me," he said of the AKP's moustachioed members. "After they saw my moustache, they got jealous and started growing their own."

He paused a moment, smiled, then added: "That is a joke."

On some level, it's not. Ipek has an ego just healthy enough to believe that he could be a facial-hair trendsetter. He described a luxury hotel he built as "the world's best hotel" and the oil he discovered in a south-east province as "the best oil in Turkey".

"I'm an exceptional person," he said matter-of-factly.

A Toxic Liability

There is a counternarrative to Ipek's life from people who knew him or followed his career. It starts with an irony: Ipek's ascent was made possible by the 2003 election to the prime ministership of Erdogan - the man who would become his nemesis.

Until then, Turkey had for decades been controlled by a secular elite backed by the military, collectively known as Kemalists. Suddenly, a conservative Muslim was the prime minister, and he badly needed to replace Kemalists with bureaucrats, judges and police officers loyal to the new administration

Erdogan struck an alliance with Gulen - then regarded not as a rival but as a conservative Muslim with highly educated acolytes. Gulenists slowly began to take jobs in the government.

Businessmen in the good graces of the Erdogan-Gulen entente were marked for greatness. Turkey was entering its expansionary era, and those with the right connections prospered.

Being associated with Gulen eventually became a toxic liability. By 2009, Erdogan began to suspect that Gulen wanted to return and run the country.

Of course, even if it were the case that Ipek was one of Gulen's truest believers, taking companies with scant due process would seem to violate most countries' legal norms. Many inside and outside Turkey believe Erdogan has exploited the failed coup as a pretext to expand his power, tossing people in prison or firing them from jobs for sins as minor as keeping money in a Gulen-connected bank. More than 130,000 people have been suspended or dismissed in the past year.

Ipek may simply have experienced the wrath of the president before everyone else. During their last face-to-face meeting, in 2012, Erdogan smouldered while reading aloud every word of a column in Bugun, Ipek's newspaper, that he found objectionable.

"He was not reasonable anymore," Ipek said. "I told him, 'Consider me your younger brother and let me tell you some truths. You need to look at the whole wall, not concentrate on one brick. I'll ask my columnists to be a little more polite, but we want people to be free to express their opinion. We promised them a free press.'"

Ipek must have realised that his future in Turkey was not secure. In late 2014, he began the process of relocating to London, forming a holding company there called Ipek Investments that would control all of his assets.

The leverage the government now has over Ipek includes his younger brother, Tekin, who was imprisoned two years ago without a trial. Akin Ipek has offered to fly to Turkey and take his brother's place if the government releases him. Come to Turkey and we'll talk, the government has countered, in Ipek's telling. It is a proposal that he has declined, because he assumes that the government will simply imprison them both.

"I've seen them do that before," he said.

Taking Over

Finding a government official to speak about the business seizures was not easy. After many phone calls, a high-ranking adviser to Erdogan agreed to an interview at his office in the presidential complex in Ankara.

The high-ranking official turned out to be a friendly man who, through a translator, opened by conveying the conditions of the interview: No one else, he said, could be quoted in the article. When I declined that offer, he had another idea. He would provide names of other sources who could be quoted. When I said that wouldn't work either, he explained that he could not appear in an article that contained negative sentiments about Turkey.

When that offer was also rejected, he agreed to share his thoughts only if his name was kept from the story and he was referred to as a "high-ranking official".

This pre-interview conversation revealed a lot about the state of mind of the country's governing party. The high-ranking official wasn't just setting these terms because he had little use for independent journalism, though he clearly preferred the pliant variety. He was setting those terms out of fear.

"Don't get me in trouble," he said several times, with a forced smile. Turkey is now a place where even those in power fret that a false step will harm their careers.

"It was a market-friendly thing that these companies were seized," he said. "We cleansed the economy of criminal companies."

"International investors aren't asking if Turkey is safe to invest in," he added. "Only journalists are asking."

New York Times