As some of you may know Dogan and I bought our own home just over two years ago.
Well, this year the tax office tracked us down and told us we owed a form of stamp duty tax. This is different to the tax you are required to pay when purchasing a house. This was an additional tax that the tax office decided that I (being a foreigner) not Dogan should pay. According to them our purchase was trade.
They calculated that I should pay almost 4000tl. By the time they tracked me down this amount had risen to just short of 10,000tl with interest and then the original amount applied to the second year.
Now people buy and sell houses all the time. But this stamp duty tax is/was just being applied to foreigners. Not only is it discriminatory but it is illegal. Not everyone has been charged with this tax but a number of foreigners that Şule Beder had represented were affected.
Anyway, Şule being Şule was having none of it. She took a supreme court ruling from a case in Kayseri to the tax office that had previously ruled in 2003 that this was illegal but the tax office weren't prepared to accept that they were in the wrong. So I gave her power of attorney to deal with this test case and she took the tax office to court. This mornıng she rang to say the tax court in Muğla had ruled in our favour and there was nothing to pay.
I know that Şule had other affected clients and she hasn't been able to contact them all. So if anyone else has purchased a house and they get an unexpected tax bill whatever you do, do not pay it and seek legal advice from Şule who will probably now with just a phone call to the tax office in Fethiye get it sorted for you.