Erol Evcil (born 2 May 1966, Mudanya, Bursa Province[1]), is a Turkish businessman convicted of money-laundering and ordering a murder.
[2] He went into hiding in 1998 after his business empire, much of it based on bank loans running into hundreds of millions of dollars obtained fraudulently, began to unravel.
[4] He was a friend of Alaattin Çakıcı[5] and Mehmet Ağar, and had done business with Cavit Çağlar, Korkmaz Yiğit, Orhan Taşanlar and Yavuz Ataç.
[7] Evcil came from an olive-growing background, he became known as the "olive king", and founded Zeytinoglu Holding in the late 1980s, becoming known as a major exporter.
[8] Eze Zeytincilik claimed to be a successful exporter, but its factory was still under construction in 1995, and records of alleged sales achieved showed prices a third higher than other Turkish companies were able to charge.
[3] Evcil's Eze Zeytincilik was confiscated by Is Bank in mid-1997, with the facility and lands estimated to be worth $4m, against $140m credit advanced for investments in the company.