Crypto Expert Chosen by Erdogan for Turkey’s Central Bank Board Turkey President Recep Tayyip
Erdoğan has appointed professor Fatma
Ozkul, an expert in crypto assets and blockchain technology, to the central bank’s rate-setting committee. According to a recent report from Bloomberg, the nomination of
Ozkul was announced in a decree on
December 22. Since 2012,
Ozkul has been a lecturer at Istanbul’s Marmara University, with a focus on accounting, finance, and auditing. Her expertise extends to blockchain technology and digital assets, and she even authored a book on crypto asset accounting in 2022, as stated in her
university profile. Ozkul is now the latest addition to Turkey’s central bank Monetary Policy Committee, whose primary responsibility is to set the benchmark interest rate to control inflation. On December 21, the committee raised the country’s interest rate by 2.5 percentage points to 42.5% as a response to Turkey’s inflation rate surpassing
61.98% in November.
After winning Turkey’s general election in May,
Erdoğan reportedly formed a new economic team, appointing former Goldman Sachs banker
Hafize Gaye
Erkan as the governor of the central bank. In 2022, the central bank successfully conducted the initial test of its own digital currency, the Digital Turkish Lira.
