It seems to be Ugur Bayar’s fate to be a civil servant. It’s the third time in five years that the 33-year-old bachelor has quit his job in the private sector and moved back to his mother’s house in Ankara to start working for the government. This is a rare phenomenon. There are droves of ex-bureaucrats in Istanbul who have left the privations of the civil service for fat salaries in the private sector; the reverse rarely happens. Ankara, a dull, characterless city whose only industry is politics, is easy to leave but notoriously difficult to return to.
“I feel as if I am permanently on call for military service,” says Bayar, fingering black worry beads as the green lights of two mobile telephones flash endlessly on his table.
Is his back to the window because he cannot stand the sight of Ankara?
“I had just rented myself a lovely flat in Istanbul,” he says. “I was on the board of several companies. I had a number of consultancies. Everything was working out fine. And then this came up. Now I am back to living with my mother and I don’t even know how I will pay the rent for my Istanbul flat.”
His salary as director of Turkey’s privatization agency is the equivalent of $1,000 a month, so it is clear that it was not the lure of money that brought him back. “I’m afraid one has been trained not to refuse when duty calls,” he explains.
Bayar comes from Turkey’s closest thing to a political aristocracy. His maternal grandfather was Istanbul’s first elected mayor. His great uncle, Refik Koraltan, was one of the founders of the Democrat Party, which ruled Turkey for 10 years until overthrown by the army. Koraltan was sentenced to death but reprieved and jailed. He was released the day Bayar was born and gave him the name Ugur, which means bringer of good luck.
Ugur’s father, Nuri Bayar, was a member of parliament for 20 years and in the 1960s and 1970s served three times as minister of industry in the Suleyman Demirel governments. Nuri Bayar died relatively young, and Ugur was raised by his mother, a vigorous personality who, according to a friend of the family, instilled in him a strong sense of public duty.
Bayar went to a French lycée and then to the State University of New York. Between 1988 and 1992 he worked in the Istanbul offices of Citibank, Turkey’s most active foreign bank.
Nuri Bayar was one of the closest friends of Demirel, now Turkey’s president, and it was at his behest that in 1992 Ugur Bayar left Citibank to become deputy director of the Public Participation Fund, which was then responsible for privatization.
In 1995 when the government changed he was forced to leave and started working for Yatyrymbank, an affiliate of TAIB, the Bahrain-based Trans Arabian Investment Bank. The bank sent him to New York, but he had been there for less than two months when the government changed again. In April 1996 prime minister Mesut Yilmaz appointed him acting director of the privatization office. But in less than four months the government fell and its successor, the pro-Islamic Refahyol coalition, fired him.
“I left swearing never to return,” says Bayar, little knowing that he would be back in less than a year. When he came to power again earlier this year Yilmaz once more summoned Bayar to Ankara.
Privatization has long been at the forefront of the political agenda in Turkey but little has been achieved. At the end of August, revenues from more than 15 years of privatization amounted to only $3.4 billion and a vast amount of work remains to be done.
“The easiest thing is to go to Istanbul, make money and criticize everything,” he says. “In the end I have to say to myself that I must try to do something for my children – not that I have any now – to be proud of. If there are 103 problems and I can solve three I can say I have done my job.”
Bayar says that he has no ambitions either in civil service or in politics but people who know him say this is not true. “He is very ambitious,” says a friend. “Otherwise why does he keep on returning to Ankara? With a surname like that, in Turkey it is difficult to avoid politics. I am sure that sooner or later he will end up in parliament.”
Bayar’s appointment was generally well received both in Turkey and abroad. “He is competent, honest, and popular,” says Cotkun Akdeniz, executive vice-president of YKB Yatirim, a Turkish investment company. “I’d rather see him than anyone else in that office.”
The director of a European consultancy says Bayar was an astute choice. “He is a man foreign investors and banks know,” he says. “There will be no credibility gap. If the government is serious about getting on with privatization then Bayar is their man.”
In Istanbul the impeccably dressed Bayar has a reputation as a bon vivant and a ladies man. “He loves luxury – champagne, caviar, big parties, that sort of thing,” says a friend. “He is someone who can light up a party with his presence. He is one of the funniest men I know. If he wanted he could have a successful career as a stand-up comic.”
For now, all that will have to wait. “Here I have no life to speak of,” says Bayar. “I get up in the morning, come here, work and often leave close to midnight. I go home, plonk myself in front of the TV, watch a bit of CNN and then pass out.”
Somehow this cannot be the whole story. When Euromoney interviewed him he was on the phone to his servant specifying the exact colour of the cashmere sweater and shoes to be packed for a weekend trip to Istanbul. And when one of his mobile phones rang, the conversation appeared to be with someone more interested in the privatizer than in Turkey’s privatization process.Metin Munir
