Turkish economic data are “detached from reality” with statistics officials picked for their loyalty to the Erdogan administration rather than merit, a former chief of the Turkish Statistical Institute (TUIK, aka Turkstat) who’s now an opposition politician has reportedly said.

“When you tamper with data, you are treading the Greek path,” Birol Aydemir told Bloomberg in a phone interview, referencing the distorted accounting of Greek public finances that helped helped trigger the 2009 eurozone crisis.

“Institutions whose independence has been impaired can’t act objectively,” Aydemir was cited as saying in a separate interview with the Sozcu daily, adding that national recordings of growth, employment and inflation were all “dubious”.

bne IntelliNews has for more than three years periodically run stories on questions being raised about the reliability of Turkey’s official data. In September 2017, we reported on how Germany’s Commerzbank had concluded that the country’s official GDP figures were “more than questionable”. In the past two years, we’ve reported on how opposition politicians have protested in parliament that Turkey’s inflation data is not credible.

‘Screened by Eurostat’

The TUIK declined to comment specifically on Aydemir’s accusations, Bloomberg said, adding that in the past it has rejected opposition criticism, saying its system of checks makes it impossible for anyone to change data and that the bureau’s procedures are regularly screened by European agency Eurostat.

Aydemir led TurkStat from 2011 to 2016. He is a co-founder of Turkey’s new opposition Deva Party, led by Turkey’s former economy czar, Ali Babacan, a former ally of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Aydemir has refused to discuss with journalists allegations on how the TUIK specifically alters the data it collects.

Turkey’s official inflation rate in June was 11.4%, but in a survey conducted that month by Metropoll, around one-third of respondents said the real inflation rate was above 30%. Only around 15% of those quizzed said the official figure was correct.