[1] As with all his siblings, his higher education was paid for by Remzi Gür, a Turkish textile entrepreneur and friend of the Erdoğan family.
On 11 May 1998, while driving through Abide-i Hürriyet street in Şişli, Istanbul, his car hit Turkish classical music singer Sevim Tanürek.
She suffered a traumatic brain injury and fell into a coma, dying five days later in intensive care.
[12] Tanürek's husband describes the incident as follows;[13]"Tayyip's son was speeding through a red light.
The families of the policemen at the Şişli police station who didn't ask for the boy's driver's license and the traffic police officers who issued fake licenses came and begged us many times during the trial, saying that if we pressed the matter, their husbands would be dismissed and they would go hungry.
Every day, municipality vehicles stopped by our door and Tayyip's men always appeared infront of our us.
This was later converted into a fine..."[13]He bought a shipping company together with Mustafa Erdoğan and Ziya İlgen in 2006 and they named it Bumerz.
[14] In November 2013, MB bought a sixth ship, Pretty, built in China for over $20 million and with a capacity of 91,000 tons, to add to the existing five ships, Safran 1, Sakarya, G. İnebolu, Cihan and Bosna that it owns.
[14] In 2013, Ynetnews reported that one of MB's ships, 95-metre Safran-1 had travelled several times between Turkish and Israeli ports despite the poor relations between the two countries, and that in the Turkish Parliament, opposition MPs had asked his father: "Has your son been exempted from the trade embargo against Israel?
Ynetnews noted that no formal trade embargo had existed at the time, except for arms sales.