The Turkish parliament voted Tuesday to send former prime minister Mesut Yilmaz to court to stand trial on fraud charges over a bank privatisation scandal.
Of the 447 deputies present in the 550-seat parliament, 429 voted in favour of sending Yilmaz and then economy minister Gunest Taner to court over the Turkbank affair.
Fifteen lawmakers voted against the proposal while three abstained.
Yilmaz is accused of pre-determining the winner in the planned privatisation of the state bank and of resorting to the services of a mafia leader to scare off unwanted bidders.
The scandal led to the collapse of Yilmaz's government in a 1998 no-confidence vote, but the centre-right politician was cleared in a parliamentary investigation in 2000 and never faced prosecution.
The vote against him comes as part of a far-reaching parliamentary inquiry looking at claims of alleged large-scale fraud in tenders, sell-offs, banking reforms and energy projects over the past decade that have reportedly cost Turkey billions of dollars.Besides Yilmaz, parliament last month voted for putting two other former ministers - former deputy prime minister Husamettin Ozkan and former economy minister Recep Onal - on trial for alleged corruption in connection with huge losses in another public bank, Halkbank.
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