A Turkish Airlines plane carrying Mehmet Hakan Atilla landed at Istanbul Airport at around 11:30 a.m. local time (0830GMT) after it took off from the New York JFK International Airport.<\/p>\n
Atila was welcomed at the airport by his family members; his wife Burcin, son Burkan, mother Ayse and father Mehmet Isik as well as banking executives and state officials.<\/p>\n
Turkish Finance and Treasury Minister Berat Albayrak, Transport and Infrastructure Minister Mehmet Cahit Turhan, and General Manager of Halkbank Osman Arslan were among those, who welcomed Atilla.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur brother Hakan has arrived in the country safe and sound and has reunited with his family members,\u201d Albayrak told reporters.<\/p>\n
Diplomatic sources said that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan held a phone conversation with Atilla after his arrival to express him and his family good wishes.<\/p>\n
Atilla, 48, the former deputy director-general at Turkish state lender Halkbank, was sentenced in May 2018 in New York for violating U.S. sanctions on Iran.<\/p>\n
However, the judge allowed the time he had served after being arrested a year earlier to be credited in the sentence, and his release on July 19 was announced earlier due to good behavior.<\/p>\n
When Atilla was convicted, Turkey blasted the verdict as \u201ca scandalous decision in a scandalous case\u201d and \u201ca conspiracy aimed at complicating Turkey\u2019s internal politics and intervening in Turkey\u2019s internal affairs”.<\/p>\n
Atilla\u2019s arrest came after Turkish businessman Riza Sarraf was arrested in 2016 in the U.S. for violating sanctions on Iran.<\/p>\n
Cooperating with prosecutors, he gave testimony against Atilla which was used to convict the banker.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A former Turkish banking executive, who was released from a federal U.S. prison last week, arrived in Istanbul on Wednesday. A Turkish Airlines plane carrying Mehmet Hakan Atilla landed at Istanbul Airport at around 11:30 a.m. local time (0830GMT) after it took off from the New York JFK International Airport. Atila was welcomed at the …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":64000,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[80,63,118,103,174,194],"tags":[6745,77747,1153,78480],"class_list":["post-63998","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-breaking-news","category-daily","category-hot","category-only-on-nationalturk","category-turkey-daily","category-turkey-general","tag-istanbul","tag-mehmet-hakan-atilla","tag-recep-tayyip-erdogan","tag-turkish-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63998","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=63998"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63998\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/64000"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=63998"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=63998"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=63998"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}