Netflix, HBO and Amazon are expected to battle it out for the rights to a gripping political-legal thriller set across two continents that has all the right ingredients. It’s a ten-part series. And the outcome is still unknown.
1998. Luxembourg. The brothers Jan and Claude Nahum — “Klod” in Turkish — have been business partners since the 1990s with İnan Kıraç, a leading figure in Turkish industry, former senior executive at Koç Holding and founder of Kıraça Holding, the group that controls Karsan Automotive, a Turkish manufacturer of commercial vehicles and electric buses whose vehicles operate in several European and American cities. Together, they founded Silcolux in Luxembourg to house their joint stake and organise their commercial flows, overseeing a Swiss subsidiary, Silco in Geneva, of which Claude Nahum is chairman of the board of directors and İnan Kıraç himself a director. Through this structure, the Nahums hold a 45% stake in Kıraça Holding — and Silco supplies automotive parts directly to Karsan worth over 160 million Turkish lira a year.
2015–2018. Turkey/United States. Thousands of miles away, a certain Sezgin Baran Korkmaz was building his own Luxembourg-based empire. This Turkish businessman, whose connections are as extensive as they are obscure — photographed in 2017 alongside President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan — controls Isanne, a company registered in Luxembourg, to which two of the Kingston brothers, members of a polygamous Mormon sect in Utah, transferred, at his request, $133m derived from a $470m tax fraud against the US tax authorities, according to court documents — Mr Korkmaz pleads not guilty. In May 2015 alone, two transfers of $35m and $21m arrived from the United States to Isanne in Luxembourg. The money was then transferred back to the United States, disguised as fake loans or share purchases. Mr Korkmaz also capitalised on the intervention of a mysterious ‘grandfather’ — a man of influence whom Jacob Kingston’s testimony before the federal court identified as former CIA Director James Woolsey — who was supposed to protect them from federal investigators. A further $6m was extorted, according to the court documents.
2017. Luxembourg/Switzerland/Turkey. The Nahum/Kıraç partnership has fallen apart. The two families have parted ways on bad terms, sparking a legal battle over the valuation of their cross-holdings, with one family holding a majority stake in Karsan and the other in Hexagon and Hexagon Design. The central issue: control of Silcolux — and thus the 45% stake in Kıraça Holding that it holds, as well as its commercial dealings with Karsan. Here, accounts differ. According to Mr Korkmaz in his public statements, İnan Kıraç allegedly asked him to buy back the shares on his behalf. According to other sources, Mr Korkmaz allegedly attempted, step by step, to buy as many shares as possible for his own account within the group’s various entities.
21 September 2020. Luxembourg. The two Silcolux companies have filed a criminal complaint alleging money laundering and misuse of company assets against their former board of directors for the 2016 and 2017 financial years. The Luxembourg Public Prosecutor’s Office confirmed this week that the investigation into this complaint is still ongoing. Specifically, the complaint challenges: the issuance by the board at the time of bonds worth €120 million intended to finance capital increases in Kıraça Holding — a mechanism whereby a Luxembourg holding company with no income took on debt to inject money into a Turkish holding company, with the professional directors in post approving transactions which the founding owners believe were carried out without their consent or against their interests.
25 September 2020. Turkey/Luxembourg. Four days after the complaint was filed, Reuters reported that Mr Korkmaz was buying Silcolux from the Nahum brothers for $82m. But according to the available court documents, the reality of the transaction is more complex: Mr Korkmaz appears to have acted as a financial agent for İnan Kıraç himself, who, prior to the signing, handed him a promissory note for $45m — a guarantee that the shares would be bought back from him at the agreed price. The sold entity holds a 45% stake in Kıraça Holding, valued at €226m in the Luxembourg accounts. By becoming the owner of Silcolux, Mr Korkmaz indirectly gains a stake in Kıraça Holding — and, by extension, in TOGG, Turkey’s national car, Erdoğan’s flagship project. However, Mr Kıraç is said to have been slow to honour his commitments. Mr Korkmaz is invoking the acknowledgement of debt. Mr Kıraç disputes the authenticity of the signatures on these documents. Tensions are rising.
28 January 2021. LuxembourgMr Korkmaz relented. He transferred the Silcolux shares to Mustafa Levent Göktaş, a former lawyer and representative of İnan Kıraç, for a sum set at €900,000 in the document filed with the Turkish stock exchange. In return, Mr Kıraç issued Mr Korkmaz with new promissory notes, in addition to the initial debt acknowledgement of $45m. These debts were never honoured either. Mr Korkmaz, targeted by the United States and gradually stripped of his assets, transferred them to a Swiss company, Wapeacon, in exchange for immediate cash. Wapeacon was unable to recover them. On 27 December 2023, it initiated enforcement proceedings before the 35th Istanbul Enforcement Office v. İnan Kıraç, Levent Göktaş and Sezgin Baran Korkmaz jointly and severally, claiming $20m. The same case, the same three men, four years on. In March 2025, the Luxembourg Register of Beneficial Owners lists Mr Göktaş as the 100% owner of the two Silcolux entities. İnan Kıraç does not appear anywhere in the Luxembourg registers. These two realities — Mr Göktaş as ‘custodian on behalf of Kıraç’ according to himself, and Mr Göktaş as ‘100% beneficial owner’ according to the RBE — are legally incompatible. They are not resolved in the publicly available documents.
June 2021. Austria/United States. The legal proceedings are gathering pace. Mr Korkmaz was arrested in Vienna on a massage table in a five-star hotel, following an international manhunt conducted at the request of the US Department of Justice. He was extradited to Utah in July 2022, released pending trial in July 2023, and disappeared from view. His trial has been adjourned several times. He is also identified as “Businessman-3” in the federal indictment targeting former New York Mayor Eric Adams for illegal campaign contributions from foreign nationals. Some US media outlets have suggested he may be cooperating with the FBI to explain his discretion — a claim neither the US justice system nor his entourage has confirmed.
June 2022. Turkey/Bulgaria. Now it is Mr Göktaş’s turn to be caught up in the net. An arrest warrant has been issued for him in connection with the murder of the academic Necip Hablemitoğlu, who was shot dead outside his home in Ankara in December 2002. For Mr Göktaş is no ordinary lawyer. Born in 1959 in Niksar, in the province of Tokat, he spent 25 years in the Turkish Special Forces, including a mission that earned him quiet fame in intelligence circles: in 1999, he took part in the capture of Abdullah Öcalan, founder of the PKK, the armed Kurdish party considered a terrorist organisation by Ankara, Washington and Brussels, whom Turkey had been hunting for years. Having retrained as a lawyer after his retirement in 2004, he was arrested in 2009 in connection with the Ergenekon case — a vast judicial purge launched under Erdoğan against secular nationalist officers accused of plotting against the government — and sentenced to more than 20 years in prison. He was released in 2014 after five years in detention, following a ruling by the Turkish Constitutional Court that his fundamental rights had been violated. Cleared of all charges, he resumed his career as a lawyer. But in June 2022, he came under suspicion by the Public Prosecutor’s Office of having ordered the murder of Hablemitoğlu and fled Turkey. Arrested in Bulgaria in September of that year during a roadside check near the Turkish border, he was extradited in December 2022 and released on bail in May 2023, with a travel ban in place. The Turkish Public Prosecutor’s Office is seeking an aggravated life sentence against him. He denies the charges. The trial is ongoing and the next hearing will take place on 18 May. It is from Niksar that he now manages two Luxembourg-based holding companies with no substantial assets.
May 2025. Luxembourg. Silcolux’s financial statements, filed simultaneously two and three years late, reveal the systematic stripping of the company’s assets. In 2022, €129.4m worth of shareholdings vanished in a single transaction, resulting in a loss of €131.4m and pushing equity down to -€98m. In 2023, the last remaining equity holding was reduced to a symbolic €1. Debts stood at €95.5m at the end of 2023 — without the accounts identifying the creditor(s). Silcolux Investments, for its part, has not filed any financial statements since 2021: three consecutive financial years missing, a serious breach of Luxembourg law that could lead to judicial dissolution at the request of the State Prosecutor. İnan Kıraç, 89, is in intensive care in Istanbul and has been placed under court guardianship. His daughter İpek Kıraç, Turkey’s richest woman according to Forbes, is looking after the conglomerate’s interests.
7 April 2026. Luxembourg. The registered office agreement has been officially terminated. The application form filed with the Trade and Companies Register places both entities in breach of the Luxembourg law of 31 May 1999. No replacement has been appointed.
Two empty shells — one technically insolvent, the other silent for three years — find themselves without a legal address in Luxembourg, nominally managed from Niksar by a man who cannot leave his country, perhaps on behalf of another who can no longer leave his hospital.
