Erdoğan threatens to cancel Turkey’s contract with S&P

PanARMENIAN.Net - Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has stepped up his verbal attacks on Standard & Poor’s (S&P) by threatening to cancel Turkey’s annual contract with the global credit rating agency, Hürriyet Daily News reported.

The Prime Minister said he found S&P’s decision to lower Turkey’s economic outlook from positive to negative “utterly ideological.”

“We sign a contract with the S&P every year. We may review it and cancel it unilaterally if needed. We are working on this issue. There is no obstacle against this,” he told a group of journalists during his visit to Pakistan, where he attended a second high-level cooperation council meeting between the two countries in Islamabad.

Signaling that Turkey may found its own rating agency, he said: “It is highly beneficial to take such a step. [The Turkish rating agency] may find members.”

It was not possible to deem global rating agencies free of political agendas, he said.

“They try to upgrade the rating of a country that is going bankrupt, but they downgrade ours. Another agency has downgraded Greece’s rating from BB to CC. We will discuss these agencies at the G-20,” he said.

The rating agency downgraded Turkey’s outlook from Positive to Stable on May 1, drawing fire from the prime minister since then.

S&P officials have said Turkey’s rating was not downgraded and that the negative outlook assessment was due to European economic woes which may have adverse effects on the country.