Ahmet Özal

After graduating from the North Carolina State University he worked at the International Monetary Fund and in international banking from 1979 to 1988. In 1989 he co-founded (with Cem Uzan) Turkey's first private television station, "Magic Box" (now Star TV).[1]

Özal was elected to the Grand National Assembly of Turkey in 1999[2] as an independent; he joined the Motherland Party in 2002,[3] and was the party's candidate for Mayor of Istanbul in the March 2009 local elections (gaining less than 1% of the vote). Later, he would become Deputy Chairman of the Democratic Party, after the Motherland Party merged with it in October 2009.[4]

Since taking public office, he has adamantly stated that he feels his late father, former Turkish President and Prime Minister Turgut Özal, was assassinated.[5] He has suggested that the Soviet Union might have been responsible, because of Turgut's efforts to unite the Turkic republics of Central Asia.[6] In 2013 Özal said that several months before the 1988 assassination attempt on Turgut, Turgut had survived a plane incident in which his official plane lost an engine and crash-landed (Ahmet was on board at the time). The manufacturer later reported a 95% probability that the plane would explode under the circumstances present.[7]

He is on the Board of Trustees of Turgut Özal University, named after his father.[1]

On 23 July 2016, in the course of the 2016 Turkish purges, the university was shut down by the Turkish government among other 15 universities[8] due to its alleged ties with the Gülen movement.[9]