Mahmut Unlu: Turkey’s leading independent i-bank

IN ADDITION

Fifty years of CEE: Is size the solution? The profiles: 14 of the biggest names in CEE Ruslan Babaev Vakhtang Butskhrikidze Piotr Chudzik Jaroslaw Derylo Philippe Heim Makar Paseniuk Umut Shayakhmetova Tomas Spurny Johann Strobl Zdenek Turek William Wells Laszlo Wolf Alexei Yakovitsky

When Unlu & Co started life as an M&A boutique in 1996, international appetite for Turkish assets was almost non-existent. Several decades of extreme economic volatility had deterred all but the hardiest investors; foreign direct flows amounted to barely $500 million a year. 

“We believed that if we could explain the opportunities presented by the Turkish market, we could get investors interested,” says founder and chairman Mahmut Unlu.