Turkey revokes experience requirement for central bank deputy governor

ISTANBUL: Turkey has revoked a requirement that central bank deputy governors have 10 years prior experience and dropped a rule that banks set aside 20% of annual profit, the official gazette showed on Sunday.

According to a decree published on the gazette, signed by President Tayyip Erdogan, the phrase "worked for at least ten years in relation to their professions" in the central bank law, was removed.

The provision, which envisages 20% of the bank's annual profit to be reserved as a reserve fund, has been repealed, the same decree said. "The accumulated reserve funds can be distributed annually by participating in the profit, except for the reserve fund set aside from the last year's profit," the decree said.

In May, the bank announced it had an annual net profit of 44.73 billion lira ($6.52 billion) in 2019. Last month, Vakifbank, Turkey's fourth-largest lender, provoked a social media storm after it appointed a former Olympic wrestling star to its board.

State lender Vakifbank had named Hamza Yerlikaya, a Greco-Roman wrestler in the 1990s, as an independent board member on June 12, the bank announced in a stock exchange filing. Yerlikaya serves as an adviser to President Erdogan and as a deputy minister for youth and sports. In the same decree, the CBRT was also given the opportunity to access banks' information instantly.