Index gatekeepers freeze Istanbul as disinflation stalls

S&P Dow Jones Indices has temporarily suspended certain index changes covering Turkish equities, citing structural problems in Turkey's capital market and concerns over the transparency of share ownership information. It is the second global index provider to put Turkish names on hold in under a month, which freezes the mechanical, passive bid that normally follows free-float and weight updates.

• The precedent: S&P Dow Jones put Turkey on its Country Classification Watch List in July, warning that special measures could follow if transparency problems persisted and that Turkey's emerging market status could be changed. The suspension is the first of those measures to land.
• The parallel: MSCI in October stopped new index additions of Turkish shares, increases in share counts and foreign investor weightings, and migrations of stocks into larger-cap indices, until further notice. The two providers together cover most of the passive money benchmarked to Turkish equities.
• What it does not do: Neither provider has reclassified Turkey out of emerging market status. The freeze blocks upgrades and inclusions rather than forcing outflows, so the immediate cost is to issuers awaiting index entry or promotion, not to existing index constituents.
• The governance backdrop: On the same days, the Savings Deposit Insurance Fund (TMSF), the state body that takes over distressed and seized financial assets, was appointed trustee to listed Peker Real Estate Investment Trust by order of Istanbul's 11th Criminal Judgeship of Peace, and reconstituted the board under chairman Enis Güçlü Şirin, with Tolga Yenice as chief executive.
• The money already moving: The payouts run off the Capital Markets Board's (SPK) decision of 17 September 2026, which halted trading in and ordered the liquidation of 131 investment funds run by seven portfolio management companies, Tera, Pusula, Hedef, Atlas, A1 Capital, Pardus and Bulls Portföy, holding more than 890 billion lira ($18.3 billion) for over 455,000 individual investors, with two banks appointed to carry out the liquidation and Türkiye İş Bankası taking over custody of the Tera Portföy funds; prosecutors are investigating the 131 funds, and the procedures for interim and final payments to rights holders were fixed by SPK decision 76/1903 of 27 October 2026 under Law No. 7596, published in the Official Gazette of 27 October 2026. Finance Minister Mehmet Şimşek told parliament's Plan and Budget Committee that TL130.2bn ($2.6bn) has been paid out across 614,874 accounts belonging to 420,031 investors in the funds under liquidation, and that 179,449 investors have recovered the whole of their net invested amount.
• What would lift it: Both providers have tied the freeze to disclosure of share ownership. Until Turkish issuers and the regulator can evidence who owns what, index-linked inflows stay capped regardless of valuation or the lira carry.

The Turkish Statistical Institute (TÜİK) reported October consumer prices up 2.58% on the month and 29.77% on the year, above the consensus of 2.20% and 29.64%, on the same day that Istanbul Chamber of Industry's manufacturing PMI fell 0.6 points to 47.3, its weakest since June. Disinflation is stalling at a point where industry is already contracting, and the government is preparing a pension top-up for January 2027 rather than waiting it out.

• The print: Clothing and footwear rose 12.58% on the month, food and non-alcoholic drinks 3.50%, housing 2.84% and transport 2.02%. The overshoot is in the slow-moving, domestically set components rather than in energy.
• The producer side: Domestic producer prices rose 1.65% on the month and 27.41% on the year. That release also fixed the 2027 revaluation rate at 27.83%, the coefficient that mechanically raises taxes, fees and administrative fines next year, putting a floor under administered price pressure.
• The demand side: New orders contracted at the fastest pace in three months and output at the fastest in four, on weak demand and high costs, according to the chamber. Car and light commercial vehicle sales fell 30.84% year on year in October to 80,334 units, with the ten-month market down 15.33% to 883,799.
• The external offset: The Trade Ministry's provisional data put the October trade deficit at $6.7bn, down 11.4% year on year, with exports up 8.1% to $25.9bn against imports up 3.4% to $32.6bn and export cover of imports at 79.4%. The external account is improving as domestic demand weakens, not alongside it.
• The fiscal answer: Labour and Social Security Minister Vedat Işıkhan told the Plan and Budget Committee the government is working on a measure to raise pensions from January 2027 above the statutory indexation. Options under discussion include a welfare share or flat-rate increase on top of the inflation differential and cash social assistance to low-income pensioners for rent, fuel and transport costs.
• The transmission: Bankruptcy rulings in 249 composition-with-creditors files in the first ten months already exceed the 247 recorded in all of 2025, up 27% year on year, with construction the leading sector among provisional moratorium grants. Allianz Trade expects Turkish corporate insolvencies to rise 31% to 2,800 in 2026, the third-largest increase in the world after Taiwan and Switzerland.

Preliminary Trade Ministry data put Turkey's October foreign trade deficit at $6.7bn, down 11.4% year on year, with exports up 8.1% to $25.9bn and imports up 3.4% to $32.6bn. Export coverage of imports rose 3.4 points to 79.4%, the second straight month in which the external gap closed by a double-digit percentage.

• The September print: TurkStat reported a September deficit of $5.163bn, down 25.8% year on year, with exports up 15.3% to $25.967bn and a coverage ratio of 83.4%.
• The read: import growth has slowed to roughly a third of export growth, consistent with weak domestic demand rather than with an export boom.
• The caveat: the October figures are the ministry's own preliminary series and will be revised when TurkStat publishes the full release.

The Istanbul Chamber of Industry manufacturing PMI fell 0.6 points to 47.3 in October, its lowest since June, while car and light commercial vehicle sales dropped 30.84% year on year to 80,334 units. Anything below 50 on the PMI signals contraction, and October was the fourth consecutive month of falling output.

• The detail: the chamber said weak demand and high costs drove the fastest contraction in new orders in three months and the fastest fall in output in four.
• The showroom: passenger car sales fell 28.4% to 64,939 and light commercial vehicles 39.52% to 15,395, according to the Automotive Distributors and Mobility Association.
• The year to date: the vehicle market has shrunk 15.33% over the first ten months to 883,799 units, so October's drop is an acceleration of an established trend, not a one-month distortion.

Courts issued bankruptcy rulings in 249 composition-with-creditors files in the first ten months of 2026, up 27% year on year and already above the 247 recorded in all of 2025, according to statistics compiled by Konkordatotakip.com from Press Advertising Agency notices. Allianz Trade separately forecasts Turkish corporate insolvencies rising 31% this year to 2,800.

• The pipeline: rejections of composition applications rose 50.5% to 1,597 while interim moratorium grants fell 28.8% to 1,656, meaning fewer firms are getting court protection and more of those that do are failing out of it.
• The sector: construction led interim moratorium grants with 121 files.
• The forecast: Allianz Trade ranks Turkey third worldwide for the expected rise in insolvencies, behind Taiwan and Switzerland, citing slowing growth, high inflation and compressed margins, and sees the count easing 7% to 2,600 in 2027 and 2% to 2,550 in 2028.

State-linked defence manufacturer ASELSAN signed a new export contract worth a total of $1.1bn with an international customer for the sale of air defence systems.

• The disclosure: neither the customer country nor the delivery schedule was named in the company's statement.

Turkish Airlines reported third-quarter revenue of $8.3bn, up 19.3% year on year, with operating profit of $929m. Passenger numbers rose 4.7% to 28.5 million and the load factor gained 1.5 points to 87.1%.

• The cargo line: freight revenue jumped 45.6% to $1.2bn, the fastest-growing part of the business in the quarter.
• The balance sheet: nine-month capital spending reached $4.6bn and consolidated assets passed $52bn.
• Why it matters: the flag carrier reports in dollars, which makes it one of the few large Turkish issuers whose results are not distorted by lira translation and inflation accounting.

Sabancı Holding lifted third-quarter net profit 388% year on year to TL4.3bn ($86m) even as consolidated revenue fell 17.1% to TL299bn ($5.97bn) and EBITDA declined 9.4% to TL46.9bn ($937m). The gain came from energy rather than from the top line.

• The engine: combined net profit in the energy segment rose 90.4% to TL8.9bn ($178m), and non-bank EBITDA rose 7% to TL33.3bn ($665m).
• The listed proxy: Enerjisa Enerji reported third-quarter net profit of TL3.8bn ($76m) against analyst expectations of TL2.3bn ($46m), with revenue down 4% to TL75.8bn ($1.51bn) and gross profit up 18% to TL20.3bn ($406m).
• The miss inside the beat: Enerjisa's EBITDA rose 22% to TL15.8bn ($316m) but fell short of the TL17.3bn ($346m) market expectation, so the earnings beat sits below the operating line.

Adnan Dalgakıran won the presidency of the Istanbul Chamber of Industry with 86 votes, ending the 13-year tenure of Erdal Bahçıvan, who had led the body since 2013. The Istanbul Chamber of Commerce, meanwhile, re-elected Şekib Avdagiç with 251 of 270 assembly votes for a third term running to 2030.

• The count: 153 of the chamber's 155 assembly members voted, and Dalgakıran beat the sitting assembly speaker Ender Yılmaz by 19 votes; in the separate assembly speakership ballot Mustafa Tecdelioğlu took 83 votes against Bahçıvan's 66.
• Why it matters: the two chambers are the main institutional channel through which Istanbul manufacturers and traders lobby Ankara on credit, tariffs and the exchange rate, and a contested handover at the industry chamber changes who carries that message.

Speaking by phone to Fox News on 3 November, the morning polls opened in the US midterms, Donald Trump said the roughly $4bn in annual American military aid to Israel will end at the end of 2026, while weapons sales continue: "We were giving them $4 billion. But that will be cut off at the end of the year." He said he and Benjamin Netanyahu agreed on this months ago, and that Israel will keep buying American arms with its own money.

• The money: the standing annual package is $3.8bn, of which $3.3bn are grants financing purchases of American weapons, equipment and services and $500m goes to the Iron Dome, Arrow and David's Sling missile defence programmes. The 2016 memorandum signed under Obama covers $38bn across fiscal 2019 to 2028, and Congress has added to it in wartime, including a package passed in April 2024 with $3.5bn in extra military financing and $5.2bn for missile and laser defence.
• The mechanism: the memorandum is a political commitment, not an appropriation. Under the rules set out by the GAO, the president can request less in future years and can temporarily withhold already appropriated funds by sending a rescission proposal to Congress, but cancelling them permanently requires Congress to agree. Trump's year-end target falls just before the new Congress is seated in January, when Democrats who won both chambers on 3 November take over the budget talks and the oversight of how current appropriations are spent.
• The hole: Israel's military spending reached $48.3bn in 2025 according to SIPRI, so the regular American grant is worth roughly 8% of it. The Knesset said in March that more than 30bn shekels of supplementary funding had been pushed into the 2026 defence budget, taking it above 142bn shekels. KAN economics commentator Shaul Amsterdamski calculates a gap of about 12bn shekels a year if the aid stops in January, and thinks a tax rise is the likeliest way it gets closed.
• The pushback: AIPAC said it supports keeping the aid memorandum running to 2028, and Israeli defence and finance officials are working through how to fund contracts already signed whose deliveries run into future years.

Emir Hayat Mukaddem, deputy chair of the Iranian parliament's national security and foreign policy committee, said ships flagged to India, China, Iraq and Qatar are now exempt from the transit restrictions Iran imposes in the Strait of Hormuz. The exemption is not uniform: Tehran will keep charging Indian and Chinese vessels for passage, while Qatari ships transit free.

• The context: the war that began on 28 February led to the closure of Hormuz and pushed petrol and diesel prices to record highs, an inflation shock that American pollsters and Trump's own midterm strategist James Blair identify as the force that broke the Republican coalition on 3 November.
• The read: a fee-based exemption regime is a toll, not a reopening. Tehran is sorting its customers rather than lifting the restriction, and the pricing distinguishes a Gulf neighbour from its two largest crude buyers.
• The exposure: for Turkish importers and shippers the relevant variable is not the headline closure but which flags move and at what cost, since the oil and LNG price path set in the Strait is already visible in third-quarter energy results, with Shell's adjusted profit up 99% to $10.81bn and Aramco's adjusted net profit up 9% to $31.2bn on an average realised price of $95.20 a barrel.

Turkey put forward Ambassador Feridun Hadi Sinirlioğlu for United Nations Secretary-General on Friday 30 October, its first ever candidacy for the post, on the same day the Security Council's seventh informal straw poll again failed to produce a consensus successor to António Guterres.

• The field: the front-runner, Costa Rica's Rebeca Grynspan, drew negative votes from two permanent members in the 16 October straw poll, the first round in which the P5 ballots were counted separately on differently coloured slips to expose a veto in advance. In the seventh round most members asked to go back to undifferentiated ballots.
• The candidate: Sinirlioğlu was foreign minister in 2015, Turkey's permanent representative to the UN from 2016 to 2023, author of an independent assessment on Afghanistan commissioned by Guterres in 2023, and has been OSCE Secretary General since December 2024, a post he took by the consensus of 57 states including four of the five permanent members, the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom and France, but not China.
• The bar: under Article 97 of the Charter and the General Assembly's resolution 79/327 of September 2025, the nominating state files a vision statement, a CV and the funding sources of the campaign, candidates take questions in televised Assembly sessions, and the Council recommends a single name only with at least nine of fifteen votes and no permanent member voting against. The precedent is Trygve Lie, who kept the job after losing Soviet support in 1950 and resigned in November 1952 having been unable to deal with one permanent member for two years.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the US administration has prepared a plan to restore Russian gas shipments to Europe via Ukraine, with the sales handled through American companies, in exchange for a ceasefire covering attacks on energy infrastructure. Trump's envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner presented it to both sides during talks in Moscow and Kyiv in September.

• The trade: Russia gets back into the European gas market, and in return is meant to accept an energy truce. The design puts American intermediaries between Gazprom and European buyers rather than restoring direct commercial ties.
• The seller's position: Gazprom returned to profit in the first nine months of the year, with revenue up 4% to RUB4.44trn and net income of RUB114.8bn, against a RUB170.3bn loss in the same period last year.
• The price backdrop: euro area annual inflation hit 4% in October on Eurostat's flash estimate, the highest since September 2023, and energy prices alone rose 20.8% year on year. Stripping energy out, the rate was 2.3%.

Turkey hosts the 31st UN climate conference in Antalya from 9 to 20 November, with the central unsettled question the annual $1.3trn in climate finance for developing countries targeted for 2035 and where it comes from. The presidency says its approach is to turn earlier summit decisions into measurable outcomes.

• The two numbers: the $300bn a year by 2035 led by developed countries is a distinct, narrower commitment sitting inside the broader $1.3trn goal, which is explicitly not meant to come from state budgets alone but from public and private sources together. The Baku-Belém Roadmap, developed by the COP29 and COP30 presidencies and published in November 2025, creates no new fund and pledges no money of its own; it describes how existing channels, development banks, grants, concessional loans and newer instruments could be scaled.
• The test: the arguments in Antalya will be over whether finance arrives as grants or as loans that add to developing-country debt, how flows are tracked and matched to national climate plans, and whether least developed countries, small island states and the hardest-hit communities can actually reach the money.
• The afterlife: Culture and Tourism Minister Mehmet Nuri Ersoy said one of Turkey's largest congress, fair and events centres will be built on the Antalya EXPO site once COP31 is over, run under the Turkish Tourism Promotion and Development Agency, with the aim of extending Antalya's conference season into winter and spring.

In an interview with Yonhap ahead of his visit to South Korea, President Erdoğan said Turkey is treating South Korea as a potential partner for the second nuclear power plant planned at Sinop and is running pre-feasibility work with the Korea Electric Power Corporation. The project as now scoped is four 1,400 MW reactors at an estimated 40 trillion won (about $30 billion), and at the 3 November 2026 Seoul summit the Export-Import Bank of Korea and Türkiye Nükleer Enerji AŞ signed a memorandum on nuclear project financing meant to help Korean firms win contracts. Ankara has still not chosen a partner or a technology, though the site has regulatory approval.

• The paper trail: Türkiye Nükleer Enerji AŞ, the state nuclear company known as TÜNAŞ, and KEPCO signed a nuclear memorandum in November 2025 covering reactor technologies, site assessments, licensing, project financing and workforce development, and the 3 November financing memorandum builds on it.
• The status: this is pre-feasibility, not a contract. Nothing in Erdoğan's account commits either side to a reactor count, a technology or a financing structure for Sinop.
• The precedent: Sinop's earlier Japanese route began with an October 2013 prime ministerial agreement with a Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and Itochu consortium using Atmea1 reactors, priced at about $22 billion for four units totalling some 4,480 MW. Costs climbed toward 5 trillion yen ($44 billion) on post-Fukushima safety requirements and a weaker lira, Itochu quit in 2018, and the consortium abandoned the project that December.

Turkey nominated Ambassador Feridun Hadi Sinirlioğlu for United Nations Secretary-General on 30 October, the same day the Security Council's seventh straw poll again failed to produce a consensus successor to António Guterres. It is Turkey's first ever candidacy for the post, and it enters a contest whose arithmetic is not about votes won but about vetoes avoided: under Article 97 of the UN Charter the General Assembly appoints on the recommendation of the Council, which requires at least nine of fifteen votes and no negative vote from a permanent member. The front-runner, Costa Rica's Rebeca Grynspan, already drew two negative permanent-member votes in the 16 October straw poll, where ballots from the five were counted separately for the first time this cycle. What Ankara is buying, if Sinirlioğlu advances, is less an office than a permanent constraint on how that office can be used.

• The mechanism: the detail of the process sits in General Assembly resolution 79/327, adopted in September 2025, under which a nominating state writes to the presidents of the Assembly and the Council enclosing the candidate's vision statement, CV and campaign funding sources, and candidates take live questions from member states. The Council has been running secret straw polls since late July, with members marking each candidate encourage, discourage or no opinion.
• The tell: colour-coded ballots that separate the permanent members' votes, designed to surface a veto before it is cast, were used for the first time on 16 October in the sixth round. In the seventh round on 30 October most members wanted to go back to undifferentiated ballots, which means the Council has, for now, chosen not to see where the vetoes lie.
• The precedent: when the Assembly first met in London in January 1946 the names discussed were Dwight Eisenhower, Anthony Eden and Lester Pearson, all of whom, on Brian Urquhart's account, would have run into a Soviet veto. The Council settled on the less prominent Trygve Lie, Norway's wartime foreign minister; the American delegation head Edward Stettinius had to ask which man in the hall he was before praising him from the podium minutes later.
• The warning: Lie backed the Council's 1950 decision to intervene in Korea, Moscow cut all contact and vetoed his second term, and the Assembly extended him three years without waiting for a Council recommendation. The Soviet Union called that a breach of the Charter and refused to deal with him; Lie stayed in post, could not do the job, and resigned in November 1952. A Secretary-General who loses one permanent member survives and stops functioning.
• The counter-case: Sinirlioğlu has already cleared a multilateral consensus test, appointed OSCE Secretary-General in December 2024 with the agreement of 57 states including four of the five permanent members, the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom and France. He was foreign minister in 2015, Turkey's permanent representative to the UN from 2016 to 2023, and wrote an independent assessment on Afghanistan at Guterres's request in 2023.
• What would falsify it: the missing name on that OSCE list is China, and OSCE consensus is not a Security Council recommendation. The test is a formal Council session recommending a single candidate; a straw poll round on colour-coded ballots showing no discourage votes from the five would be the first hard evidence that Ankara's candidate is more than a placeholder in a deadlocked field.

S&P Dow Jones Indices said on 5 November 2026 that no Turkish stock will be added to its indices at the December review and that quarterly or non-mandatory changes to share counts and investable weight factors for Turkish-traded shares will not be applied, and it placed Turkey on its 2026/2027 Country Classification Watch List, citing structural problems in Turkey's capital market and concerns over the transparency of share ownership information. It follows MSCI, which on 15 October halted new index entries for Turkish stocks, increases in share counts and foreign investor weightings, and migrations into larger indices, effective immediately and until further notice, on free-float reliability and market integrity grounds, and warned that insufficient progress by June 2027 could trigger a consultation on reclassification from Emerging to Frontier or Standalone. S&P had already put Turkey on the watch list on 7 July, keeping it classified as emerging while flagging special measures or frontier status as the potential outcome. Neither provider has reclassified Turkey. What both have done is switch off the pipe through which passive money reaches Istanbul at the margin, at a moment when the domestic numbers are deteriorating.

• The mechanism: index membership, weight and tier determine what passive and benchmarked money must hold. A freeze on new entries, on weight increases and on promotions does not force a single seller, but it caps incremental foreign demand and leaves active managers to price Turkish risk without a passive bid behind them. The stated reason is not macro policy but ownership transparency, which is a market-plumbing complaint and therefore cheaper to fix than an inflation problem. The complaint has a specific origin: after institutional investors flagged repeated, possibly coordinated trading through funds closely tied to small-cap listed companies that artificially inflated free-float ratios, the Capital Markets Board changed the actual free-float calculation from 11 September to exclude stakes of 10%-plus holders and indirect holdings through hedge funds, private funds or other listed companies, and Borsa Istanbul said on 21 September that dozens of the stocks central to the episode would leave the BIST 100 at the start of October.
• The domestic backdrop: October consumer inflation came in at 2.58% month on month and 29.77% year on year, above the 2.20% and 29.64% expected, with clothing and footwear up 12.58% and food and non-alcoholic drinks up 3.50%. The Istanbul Chamber of Industry manufacturing PMI fell 0.6 points to 47.3, its lowest since June, with new orders contracting at the fastest rate in three months and output at the fastest in four.
• The corporate evidence: 249 companies in composition proceedings were declared bankrupt in the first ten months, up 27% year on year and already past the 247 recorded in all of 2025, while rejections of composition applications rose 50.5% to 1,597 and construction led the provisional moratorium list with 121 files. Allianz Trade expects Turkish corporate insolvencies to rise 31% to 2,800 in 2026, the third fastest increase in the world after Taiwan and Switzerland. Car and light commercial vehicle sales fell 30.84% in October to 80,334 units.
• The trust problem: Finance Minister Mehmet Şimşek told parliament's Planning and Budget Committee that TL130.2bn ($2.6bn) has been paid into 614,874 accounts belonging to 420,031 investors in investment funds under liquidation, and that 179,449 of them have recovered the whole of their net investment. That is the retail side of the same confidence question the index providers are asking from the institutional side.
• The counter-case: the external accounts are improving and earnings are not uniformly bad. The October trade deficit narrowed 11.4% year on year to $6.7bn, with exports up 8.1% to $25.9bn and import cover rising 3.4 points to 79.4%; Sabancı Holding lifted third-quarter net profit 388% to TL4.3bn ($86m) and Enerjisa posted TL3.8bn ($76m) against a TL2.3bn consensus. Aselsan signed a $1.1bn air defence export contract with an international customer.
• What would falsify it: a visible step on share ownership disclosure followed by S&P lifting the freeze or removing Turkey from the watch list would show this is a plumbing episode with a short half-life. The opposite signal is a reclassification out of emerging-market status, which would turn a pause on inflows into forced selling by funds whose mandates track the classification rather than the index.

Domestic producer prices rose 1.65% in October and 27.41% year on year, which fixed the revaluation rate for 2027 at 27.83%. That coefficient is the multiplier the state applies to tax brackets, administrative fees and fines, so it is the number that sets next year's cost of compliance for anyone operating in Turkey.

• The use: filing fees, motor vehicle tax, traffic and regulatory fines and various thresholds all step up by that percentage from January unless the government legislates a lower figure.

The Istanbul Chamber of Industry manufacturing PMI fell 0.6 points to 47.3 in October, the lowest reading since June and a sixteenth consecutive month below the 50 line that separates expansion from contraction in the survey's construction.

• The detail: new orders contracted at the fastest pace in three months and output at the fastest in four, which the chamber attributed to weak demand and high costs.

Car and light commercial vehicle sales fell 30.84% year on year in October to 80,334 units, according to the Automotive Distributors and Mobility Association. Over the first ten months the market is down 15.33% to 883,799 units.

• The split: passenger cars fell 28.4% to 64,939 and light commercials 39.52% to 15,395, so the fleet and small-business end of the market is deteriorating faster than retail.

Courts issued bankruptcy rulings in 249 debt-composition (konkordato) files in the first ten months of 2026, up 27% year on year and already above the 247 recorded in all of 2025, on figures compiled by Konkordatotakip.com from Press Advertisement Agency notices.

• The pipeline: rejections of composition applications rose 50.5% to 1,597 while grants of provisional moratorium fell 28.8% to 1,656, meaning fewer companies are getting shelter and more are being pushed through to liquidation.
• The sector: construction led provisional moratorium filings with 121 files.
• The forecast: Allianz Trade projects Turkish corporate insolvencies rising 31% to 2,800 in 2026, the third-steepest increase worldwide after Taiwan and Switzerland, before easing to 2,600 in 2027 and 2,550 in 2028.

The state-controlled defence electronics manufacturer ASELSAN signed a new export contract worth a total of $1.1bn for the sale of air defence systems to an international customer, which it did not name.

Transport Minister Abdulkadir Uraloğlu said Turkish State Railways signed a €350m financing agreement with the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank for a maintenance and modernisation programme costed at €535.7m in total, with the remaining €185.7m funded from Turkey's own resources.

• The scope: 99 new-generation machines join the maintenance fleet and existing machines are refurbished, with the aim of shortening the windows in which lines are closed for maintenance.

Preliminary Trade Ministry data put the October trade deficit at $6.7bn, down 11.4% year on year, with exports up 8.1% to $25.9bn and imports up 3.4% to $32.6bn. The export-to-import cover ratio rose 3.4 points to 79.4%.

• The month before: the statistics office put the September deficit at $5.163bn, down 25.8%, on a cover ratio of 83.4%, so October is a wider gap than September on both measures despite the annual improvement.

Turkey hosts the UN climate conference COP31 in Antalya from 9 to 20 November, with finance, adaptation, loss and damage and implementation the headline agenda items. Culture and Tourism Minister Mehmet Nuri Ersoy said that after the summit the EXPO site will be redeveloped into one of Turkey's largest congress, fair and events centres under the state tourism promotion agency TGA.

• The finance question: negotiators arrive with the Baku-Belém roadmap, published in November 2025, which sets out how to mobilise at least $1.3tn a year by 2035 from public and private sources, of which a developed-country-led $300bn a year is one component; the roadmap creates no new fund and pledges no money itself.

Tarkan has re-recorded his 2008 track "Uyan" in English, with new lyrics and a new arrangement, as "Wake Up" for the UN climate conference Turkey hosts in Antalya from 9 to 20 November. The video sets images of climate damage against the singer's call for collective action: "Our time is running out. We must act before it is too late."

• The venue afterwards: Culture and Tourism Minister Mehmet Nuri Ersoy said one of Turkey's largest congress, fair and events centres will be built on the Antalya EXPO site once COP31 ends, run under the Turkish Tourism Promotion and Development Agency, with the aim of pulling business tourism into the winter and spring months.
• The footnote: COP31 itself is estimated to generate more than 100,000 tonnes of CO2 equivalent, a figure critics in Turkey are already using against the summit's own agenda.

The Education Ministry has launched its Turkish Gastronomy High Schools project with the opening of the Erzurum Ülker Gastronomy Vocational and Technical Anatolian High School, the first of a planned network in which each school teaches a regional cuisine over a five-year programme.

• The map: Erzurum will specialise in meat and dairy, Istanbul in Ottoman palace cuisine, Gaziantep in baklava and Konya in Seljuk cooking, with the stated aim of covering the culinary traditions of all seven geographic regions.
• The trade side: the sector's own showcase, the Gastromasa International Gastronomy Conference and Fair, returns to Istanbul's Haliç Congress Centre on 26 and 27 November for an eleventh edition themed "Culture & Interaction", with Pierre Hermé, Mauro Uliassi, Andoni Luis Aduriz, Simon Rogan, Bruno Verjus, Pía León and Rodolfo Guzmán on the programme.

The Court of Cassation has overturned the lower court ruling that rejected the family of singer Ahmet Kaya's request to halt screenings of the biographical film İki Gözüm Ahmet, sending the question back for fresh consideration.

• The reasoning: the decision pointed to the film going into release without the family's consent and to its use of fictional characters and events touching Kaya's private life.
• Why it travels: a producer distributing a biopic in Turkey without sign-off from the subject's heirs now faces a live risk of injunction after release, not only a damages claim.