Commercial Law in Turkey
Commercial law in Turkey is the body of rules under the Turkish Commercial Code No. 6102 that governs commercial transactions, the duties of merchants and the disputes arising between them.
A foreign company usually meets this body of law twice, and the two meetings sit far apart. The first is at signature, when a supply, distribution or service agreement is drafted and both sides are still agreeable. The second is on the day something goes wrong: the goods arrive damaged, an invoice goes unpaid, a distributor is told the relationship is over. Between those two moments Turkish law has been running clocks that nobody started deliberately and nobody was notified about, and by the time the second meeting happens, some of them have already expired.
Oznur & Partners advises foreign companies, exporters, importers and Turkish subsidiaries of international groups on those transactions and on the disputes that follow them. Our commercial practice in Istanbul works on supply and distribution agreements, cross-border sales, agency and franchise relationships, debt recovery, litigation before the commercial courts, arbitration, and customs and trade remedy proceedings.
Clients arriving from common law and continental European systems tend to open with the same question. What does a commercial lawyer in Turkey actually handle that a corporate lawyer does not? Corporate law deals with the company as an entity, its capital, its organs and its shareholders; commercial law deals with what that company does with everyone outside it. Contracts, deliveries, invoices, payment defaults, terminations and the litigation or arbitration that follows are commercial work, and they run on a separate body of rules with separate deadlines.
The second question is usually asked with genuine surprise. When does an ordinary commercial relationship turn into a legal problem? Usually several weeks before either side notices. Under Article 23 of the Turkish Commercial Code No. 6102, a buyer who receives visibly defective goods has two days to notify the seller, and a buyer who receives goods whose defect is not visible has eight days to inspect them and report the result. A company that spends three weeks negotiating a replacement in good faith has, in legal terms, accepted the goods.
Foreign parties then ask about the forum, and the answer has one step most people do not expect. Which body will decide the dispute, and is there any way around the Turkish courts? Commercial disputes are heard by the commercial courts of first instance (asliye ticaret mahkemesi), but for money claims the case cannot be filed at all until mandatory mediation has been attempted, and where the parties have signed a valid arbitration clause the dispute leaves the court system altogether.
The last question is about the contract itself, and the answer cuts both ways. How much protection does a carefully drafted agreement actually give in Turkey? Turkish commercial law is generous about what merchants may agree and strict about how they must say it. Parties are largely free to set price, penalty, term and governing law, but Article 18 of the Turkish Commercial Code No. 6102 dictates the form of any notice placing the other side in default, terminating the agreement or withdrawing from it, and a termination sent by ordinary email may not produce the effect the drafter intended.
Commercial law governs the transactions a business enters into with third parties. It does not govern the internal organisation of the business itself, its capital, its organs, its shareholder relations or its annual filings, all of which fall under corporate law in Turkey, and it does not cover the employment relationships inside the company or the taxation of its income.
⚖️ What Does Commercial Law Cover in Turkey, and Where Does It Stop?
Commercial law in Turkey covers commercial enterprises, the status and duties of merchants, commercial transactions and the special rules that apply to them, carriage, maritime trade and insurance, together with the procedural regime for commercial disputes. The governing statute is the Turkish Commercial Code No. 6102 (Türk Ticaret Kanunu), in force since 1 July 2012, supplemented by the Turkish Code of Obligations No. 6098 for matters the Commercial Code does not regulate separately.
The Code is built as a set of books, and the distinction between them decides which lawyer you need. One book regulates companies: their formation, capital, organs and dissolution. The remaining books regulate activity: the commercial enterprise, commercial affairs and their evidence, negotiable instruments, carriage, maritime trade and insurance. A foreign business will normally spend its first month in the company book and the following decade in the others.
What makes the Turkish system distinctive is that it does not treat commercial rules as a softer version of general contract law. It treats them as a harsher one. Where general civil law gives a party a reasonable period, commercial law gives two days. Where general civil law lets a judge reduce an excessive penalty, commercial law removes that discretion. Where general civil law allows any form of notice, commercial law names four permitted channels. The logic is that merchants are professionals and can be held to professional standards, and the effect is that a foreign company applying its ordinary commercial instincts here will be slower than the law expects.
An important classification decides whether these rules apply at all. Under Article 19 of the Turkish Commercial Code No. 6102, if a transaction is a commercial affair for one party, it is a commercial affair for both. A private individual who sells a piece of equipment to a Turkish manufacturer is on the commercial side of the line for that transaction, whether or not they considered themselves in business.
This is where an unhelpful assumption usually enters. Because Turkish law is codified and continental in structure, European counterparties assume it will behave like the system they know at home. On substance it often does. On procedure and deadlines it does not, and procedure is where commercial claims are actually won and lost in Turkey.
⚖️ Why Does It Matter Whether Your Counterparty Is a Merchant?
It matters because merchant status changes the rules that apply to the same contract. A merchant (tacir) is a person or entity operating a commercial enterprise, and under Turkish law that status carries a set of consequences the counterparty rarely negotiates and frequently does not know about.
Article 18 of the Turkish Commercial Code No. 6102 requires every merchant to act as a prudent businessperson in all activities relating to their trade. The provision reads like a general principle and functions like an evidentiary rule: a merchant who did not read a clause, did not check a delivery or did not calculate an exposure is presumed to have been capable of doing so. Ignorance of a commercial consequence is not an argument a merchant can make in a Turkish court.
The most expensive consequence sits in Article 22 of the Turkish Commercial Code No. 6102. A debtor with merchant status cannot ask the court to reduce a fee or a contractual penalty on the ground that it is excessive. In an ordinary civil contract, the Turkish Code of Obligations No. 6098 lets a judge reduce a disproportionate penalty of their own motion; between merchants, that safety valve is closed. A penalty clause a foreign company signs quickly on the assumption that a court would trim it later is enforceable at its full stated amount.
There is one qualification, and it is a practical one rather than a statutory one. The Court of Cassation has consistently accepted that where a penalty is so large that it would cause the economic ruin of the merchant debtor, a reasonable reduction may still be made, and in those cases the court examines the debtor’s commercial books and balance sheets through an expert before deciding. The exception exists, but it is argued on financial destruction rather than on unfairness, and it is a poor substitute for negotiating the clause properly.
Default interest follows the same pattern. Under Article 2 of Law No. 3095 on Statutory Interest and Default Interest, where the parties have not agreed a rate, interest on a late commercial payment is claimed at the short-term advance rate applied by the Central Bank of the Republic of Türkiye (Türkiye Cumhuriyet Merkez Bankası) on 31 December of the preceding year, provided that rate exceeds the ordinary statutory rate. The rate for the year is therefore fixed by a figure published before the year began, and it moves mid-year only if the advance rate has shifted by five points or more by 30 June.
Foreign suppliers sometimes ask us a version of this in blunter terms: does it help us or hurt us that our Turkish customer is a company rather than an individual? Both, and in different places. It helps at enforcement, because commercial debtors keep statutory books that create evidence and hold assets that can be traced. It hurts at the contract stage, because every strict rule described above applies to your side of the agreement in exactly the same way it applies to theirs.
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⚖️ The Deadlines That Start Running Before Anyone Calls a Lawyer
Three deadlines in Turkish commercial law expire before most companies have finished their internal discussion about the problem. None of them is announced, none of them requires a court, and each of them converts a live claim into an accepted position.
The first concerns defective goods. Under Article 23 of the Turkish Commercial Code No. 6102, where a defect is obvious at delivery, the buyer must notify the seller within two days. Where the defect is not obvious, the buyer has eight days from delivery to inspect the goods or have them inspected, and must report any defect found within that same period. A defect that only emerges later through use is governed by the Turkish Code of Obligations No. 6098 and must be reported promptly once discovered. A buyer who misses these periods is treated as having accepted the goods as delivered and loses the right to demand replacement, repair, a price reduction or rescission.
The second concerns invoices. Under Article 21 of the Turkish Commercial Code No. 6102, a person who receives an invoice and does not object to its content within eight days is deemed to have accepted that content. The presumption is not conclusive and can be rebutted with evidence, but the burden has moved: instead of the issuer proving the amount was owed, the recipient now has to prove it was not. Where the unchallenged invoice has also been entered into commercial books, the position becomes considerably harder to reverse.
The third concerns the form of notice rather than its timing. Under Article 18 of the Turkish Commercial Code No. 6102, notices between merchants that place the other side in default, terminate an agreement or withdraw from it must be sent through a notary, by registered mail, by telegram, or through the registered electronic mail system (KEP) using a secure electronic signature. A termination sent by ordinary email or courier may still have commercial meaning, but it may not have produced the legal effect the sender needed on the date they needed it.
Read together, these three provisions explain a pattern we see repeatedly. A foreign company with a strong commercial position and a well-drafted contract arrives having lost the procedural argument in the first fortnight, and the merits never get examined. Turkish commercial law does not punish being wrong nearly as heavily as it punishes being late.
⚖️ Commercial Contracts Under Turkish Law
Commercial contracts in Turkey are governed by freedom of contract under the Turkish Code of Obligations No. 6098, modified by the merchant-specific rules of the Turkish Commercial Code No. 6102. Parties may set their own price, term, penalty, delivery terms and dispute resolution mechanism, and Turkish courts enforce commercial bargains as written far more readily than they revise them.
The clauses that fail in practice are rarely the commercial ones. They are the mechanical ones: a termination clause that does not specify the channel of notice required by Article 18 of the Turkish Commercial Code No. 6102, a penalty expressed in a way that makes the trigger ambiguous, a delivery specification that leaves the inspection period undefined against a statutory eight-day clock, or a governing law clause paired with a jurisdiction clause that points somewhere else.
Choice of foreign law is permitted in contracts with a foreign element under the Act on Private International and Procedural Law No. 5718 (Milletlerarası Özel Hukuk ve Usul Hukuku Hakkında Kanun). Two limits matter in practice. Turkish mandatory rules and public policy continue to apply regardless of the chosen law, and a foreign law chosen for a dispute that will nonetheless be heard in a Turkish court has to be proved to that court, which adds cost and time to every hearing.
A rule from 1926 still catches foreign groups by surprise. The Law on the Compulsory Use of Turkish in Economic Enterprises No. 805 requires Turkish companies and enterprises to keep their records and conduct their transactions within Turkey in Turkish. Its application to contracts where one party is foreign has been the subject of long-running debate and inconsistent case law, and the practical response is not to argue the point but to execute commercial agreements bilingually with a stated prevailing language.
Standard terms deserve separate attention because they are where cross-border templates lose their force. General conditions imposed by one party are subject to the review provisions of the Turkish Code of Obligations No. 6098, and a clause that was never individually negotiated and works heavily against the other side can be treated as unwritten. A supplier who ships to Turkey on the strength of terms printed on the reverse of an order form is relying on a document that may not survive review. Our commercial contract practice drafts to Turkish enforcement rather than to template, and the same discipline applies to lease and sales contracts where the counterparty is a Turkish merchant.
⚖️ Distribution, Agency and Franchise Relationships
Long-term distribution relationships in Turkey carry a termination cost that does not appear in the contract. Agency is regulated in Articles 102 to 123 of the Turkish Commercial Code No. 6102, and the provision that decides the economics of an exit is Article 122.
Article 122 of the Turkish Commercial Code No. 6102 gives a terminated agent a right to compensation where three conditions are met together: the principal continues to derive significant benefit from the customers the agent introduced, the agent loses commission it would have earned had the relationship continued, and payment is equitable in the circumstances of the case. The claim is capped at the average annual commission or other payments received by the agent over its final five years, and where the relationship lasted less than five years, the average over its actual duration is used.
Two features of the provision change how termination should be planned. The claim must be brought within one year of the relationship ending, which is a short window for a distributor to organise, and the right cannot be waived in advance, so a clause in the agency agreement purporting to exclude it does not work. Under Article 122 of the Turkish Commercial Code No. 6102, these rules also extend, so far as equitable, to exclusive distributorship and similar continuing relationships that confer a monopoly right.
The practical consequence for a foreign principal is that the cost of ending a Turkish distribution relationship is calculated from commission history rather than from the notice period. A principal who has paid a distributor well for eight years and then terminates on three months’ notice has complied with the contract and may still face a claim measured against five years of average commission.
Franchise arrangements are not separately codified in Turkish law and are constructed from the general law of obligations, competition rules and intellectual property protection, which makes drafting quality the main variable. The recurring failure points are territory definition, post-termination non-competition, and the treatment of the franchisee’s customer base on exit. Our franchise law practice addresses these at the negotiation stage, because the cost of clarifying them later is measured in litigation rather than in drafting time.
⚖️ Before You Can Sue: Mandatory Mediation in Commercial Disputes
A commercial money claim cannot be filed in a Turkish court until mediation has been attempted. Article 5/A of the Turkish Commercial Code No. 6102, added by Law No. 7155 and in force since 1 January 2019, makes an application to a mediator a procedural precondition for commercial cases whose subject matter is the payment of a sum of money, including debt claims and damages claims.
The timetable is fixed by statute. The mediator must conclude the process within six weeks of appointment, extendable by the mediator by a maximum of two further weeks where necessary. Limitation periods are suspended from the application to the final minutes, which means the process does not cost the claimant its claim even when it fails.
The consequence of skipping the step is procedural rather than substantive. Where a claimant files without having applied to a mediator, the court dismisses the case on procedural grounds without examining the merits, and the claimant must complete the step and file again. A claimant who has been through mediation without agreement must attach the original or a certified copy of the final minutes to the statement of claim, and a claim filed without that document is dismissed for the same reason.
Two limits are worth knowing before assuming the requirement applies. The mediation precondition does not apply where a valid arbitration agreement covers the dispute, and it does not apply to enforcement proceedings, interim attachment or interim injunction applications, which can be pursued immediately. Where an interim measure has been obtained first, however, short statutory periods run for taking the substantive step, so speed at the interim stage creates a new deadline rather than removing one.
There is a strategic reading of this regime that foreign claimants often miss. The six-week window is the cheapest structured opportunity to see the other side’s position, its documents and its willingness to pay, and a claimant who treats mediation as a formality to be endured gives that advantage away. Where the process does not resolve the matter, the file moves to commercial litigation with a clearer picture of the defence.
⚖️ Which Court Hears the Case, and With How Many Judges
Commercial disputes in Turkey are heard by the commercial courts of first instance (asliye ticaret mahkemesi), which are specialised courts sitting in the larger jurisdictions and replaced by the general civil courts of first instance where no commercial court has been established. Articles 4 and 5 of the Turkish Commercial Code No. 6102 define which matters qualify as commercial cases and allocate them to these courts regardless of the amount in dispute.
Some disputes are commercial by nature, whatever the parties do for a living. Cases arising from the Turkish Commercial Code itself, from negotiable instruments, from carriage, from insurance and from a defined list of other statutes are absolute commercial cases. Others qualify because they concern the commercial enterprise of at least one party. The distinction is not academic: filing in the wrong court costs months, because the file is transferred rather than decided.
The composition of the bench and the procedure both turn on value. Under Article 4 of the Turkish Commercial Code No. 6102, commercial cases whose value does not exceed a statutory threshold, set at one million Turkish lira in the provision itself and increased each year by the revaluation mechanism of the Code of Civil Procedure No. 6100, are heard under the simplified procedure and by a single judge. Cases above the current threshold are heard by a panel of a president and two members.
Certain matters go to a panel irrespective of value. Bankruptcy proceedings, applications concerning the composition with creditors, and applications relating to arbitration such as challenges to arbitrators and the recognition and enforcement of foreign arbitral awards are decided by the full bench. Where a case is heard by a panel, interim attachment and interim injunction applications connected with it are also decided by the panel rather than by a single judge.
Evidence in commercial cases carries one feature with no equivalent in most foreign systems. Statutory commercial books, properly kept and certified, can be examined as evidence under the Code of Civil Procedure No. 6100, and books that support the position of the party who kept them can be relied on where the statutory conditions are met. A Turkish counterparty with disciplined bookkeeping enters the dispute with a documentary advantage, which is one reason commercial contract disputes here are frequently decided on records rather than on witnesses.
⚖️ Arbitration and When It Is Worth Choosing
Arbitration in Turkey is governed by two statutes depending on the character of the dispute. The International Arbitration Law No. 4686 (Milletlerarası Tahkim Kanunu), enacted in 2001 and modelled on the UNCITRAL Model Law, applies where the seat is in Turkey and the dispute contains a foreign element. Purely domestic arbitrations are governed by the Code of Civil Procedure No. 6100.
Institutional arbitration has a local option that did not exist a decade ago. The Istanbul Arbitration Centre (İstanbul Tahkim Merkezi, ISTAC) was established in 2015 and now administers a substantial domestic and international caseload across service, construction, sales, corporate and franchising disputes. For a mid-value cross-border contract, an ISTAC clause typically produces a lower cost and a shorter timetable than one of the established European institutions, while keeping the award enforceable through the same treaty framework.
The choice between arbitration and the Turkish courts turns on four practical variables rather than on principle: the value at stake, whether confidentiality matters, where the losing party’s assets sit, and whether the dispute will require technical expertise the parties would rather select than receive. A foreign supplier whose counterparty holds all its assets in Turkey often gains little from arbitrating abroad, because the award still has to be brought back to a Turkish court for enforcement.
An arbitration agreement also changes the pre-action position. Where a valid arbitration clause covers the dispute, the mandatory mediation precondition in Article 5/A of the Turkish Commercial Code No. 6102 does not apply, and the claimant proceeds directly to arbitration. Clause quality decides whether that advantage survives, since a clause that names an institution imprecisely or leaves the seat undefined produces a jurisdictional fight before the merits are ever reached. Our arbitration practice drafts and litigates these clauses, and reviews inherited ones before a dispute makes the drafting permanent.
⚖️ Enforcing a Foreign Judgment or Arbitral Award in Turkey
A foreign judgment or arbitral award has no automatic effect in Turkey and must pass through a Turkish court before it can be executed. The Act on Private International and Procedural Law No. 5718 governs the process: Articles 50 to 59 deal with foreign court judgments, and Articles 60 to 63 deal with foreign arbitral awards.
Turkish law distinguishes two outcomes that foreign clients often treat as one. Recognition (tanıma) gives the foreign decision res judicata and evidentiary effect in Turkey; enforcement (tenfiz) authorises coercive execution as though the decision were a Turkish judgment. A creditor who only needs to rely on a foreign finding in Turkish proceedings may need recognition alone, which is a lighter application than full enforcement.
For arbitral awards the treaty framework carries most of the weight. Turkey ratified the New York Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards in 1992, subject to the reciprocity and commercial reservations, and awards from other contracting states are enforced under the Convention supported by the Act on Private International and Procedural Law No. 5718. Under Article 60 of that Act, the competent court is the commercial court of first instance chosen by the parties, failing which the court at the debtor’s domicile, then habitual residence, then the place where the assets subject to enforcement are located.
Foreign court judgments follow a different route with a harder condition. Enforcement requires reciprocity between Turkey and the state of origin, established by treaty, by statute or in practice, and the absence of reciprocity is the ground on which applications most often fail. A judgment creditor whose home state has no reciprocity with Turkey is not without remedy, but the remedy is fresh proceedings on the merits in Turkey rather than enforcement of the existing judgment.
The review is procedural rather than substantive in both routes. A Turkish court examining an enforcement application does not reopen the merits; it checks jurisdiction, service, finality, public policy and the treaty or reciprocity conditions. Defects in service on the losing party and conflicts with Turkish public policy are the two grounds that recur, and both are decided by what happened abroad rather than by anything the creditor can repair in Turkey. This is why recognition and enforcement work is planned during the foreign proceedings rather than after them, with service on the Turkish party documented at the time it is effected.
⚖️ Getting Paid: Debt Recovery and Insolvency
Turkish debt recovery does not begin with a lawsuit. Under the Execution and Bankruptcy Law No. 2004 (İcra ve İflas Kanunu), a creditor can open enforcement proceedings without any prior judgment, and the enforcement office issues a payment order to the debtor on the strength of the creditor’s application alone.
The debtor’s response window is short and decisive. Under Article 62 of the Execution and Bankruptcy Law No. 2004, the debtor has seven days from service of the payment order to object, and an objection stops the proceedings immediately. A debtor who lets the seven days pass without objecting has allowed the enforcement to become final, and the creditor proceeds to attachment without ever proving the debt in court.
Where the debtor does object, the creditor chooses between two routes depending on the documents it holds. A creditor with a qualifying written document can apply to the enforcement court to have the objection set aside, which is the faster path. A creditor without such a document brings an action to annul the objection, and under Article 67 of the Execution and Bankruptcy Law No. 2004 that action must be filed within one year of the objection being served on the creditor. Where a party’s position is found to have been advanced in bad faith, the court can order a statutory penalty calculated as a proportion of the sum in dispute.
Insolvency changes the analysis entirely and rewards early information. Once a Turkish debtor obtains protection through composition proceedings, individual enforcement is suspended and the creditor’s position is decided collectively rather than through its own attachment. A supplier who learns of the application through the trade registry gazette after the protective period has begun has lost the window in which enforcement would have been effective.
For cross-border creditors the practical sequence is usually asset investigation first and strategy second, because the enforcement route worth choosing depends on what can actually be reached. Our work in this area covers international debt collection, debtor asset investigation, and representation in bankruptcy and insolvency proceedings where the debtor’s position has already deteriorated.
⚖️ Cross-Border Trade, Customs and Trade Remedies
Cross-border trade adds a regulatory layer on top of the commercial one, and its deadlines are administrative rather than contractual. The Customs Law No. 4458 (Gümrük Kanunu) governs import and export procedure, valuation, classification, origin and the penalties attached to each of them. A dispute here is not with the counterparty but with the administration, which means the clock is set by a notification rather than by a delivery, and the response has to be filed with a specified authority in a specified form.
The objection timetable is the figure to know before a dispute arises. Under Article 242 of the Customs Law No. 4458, a party has fifteen days from notification of a customs duty assessment, a penalty or an administrative decision to object in writing to the superior authority, or to the same authority where there is none. The administration must decide the objection within thirty days and notify the decision, and a rejection opens the way to the administrative courts. An objection lodged with the wrong authority within the period is treated as timely and forwarded internally.
Classification and valuation disputes are worth separating from penalty disputes because they behave differently. A classification dispute is a technical argument about which tariff heading applies and is often resolved with expert evidence about the goods themselves. A valuation dispute concerns the price actually paid and the elements added to it, and it turns on documentation the importer either has or does not have at the moment of the assessment. Our international trade and customs practice handles both, and our trade law analysis covers the regulatory background against which they are decided.
Trade remedy proceedings run on a separate track under the Ministry of Trade (Ticaret Bakanlığı), whose procedures and current investigations are published at ticaret.gov.tr. An exporter facing a Turkish anti-dumping investigation is not a defendant in litigation but a participant in an administrative proceeding with questionnaires, deadlines and a right to be heard, and a company that does not respond is assessed on the facts available. Our anti-dumping practice represents exporters and importers in those proceedings, and the customs treatment of goods passing through Turkey without entering free circulation is covered separately in our note on transit trade and its tax exemption.
Carriage is where trade law and commercial law meet, and it generates a disproportionate share of disputes because the goods have moved and the damage is discovered late. Carriage, maritime trade and insurance each have their own book in the Turkish Commercial Code No. 6102, with their own limitation periods and their own allocation of liability between carrier, shipper and insurer. Sea carriage disputes, cargo claims and vessel arrest are handled by our maritime practice, and air cargo and aviation matters by our aviation practice.
⚖️ How We Work With Foreign Businesses
Our commercial work is conducted remotely by default, from Istanbul, for clients across Europe, the Gulf, Asia and North America. Contract review and negotiation, mediation representation, enforcement applications and customs objections can all be conducted without the client travelling to Turkey.
Representation is arranged through a power of attorney (vekaletname) executed before a notary in the client’s own country, legalised with an apostille under the Hague Apostille Convention of 1961, translated by a sworn translator and submitted to the relevant Turkish authority. Where the client’s country is outside the Convention, the alternative is certification through a Turkish consulate, which adds time to the schedule rather than complexity. The instrument is drafted to the matter rather than in general terms, because Turkish courts and enforcement offices reject powers that omit the specific authority required.
Four situations account for most of the commercial files we open. A foreign supplier or buyer needs a Turkish counterparty agreement drafted or reviewed before signature. An existing relationship has broken down and a claim needs to be assessed against the statutory deadlines before anything is sent. A judgment or award obtained abroad needs to be enforced against Turkish assets. Or an importer or exporter has received a customs assessment or been named in a trade remedy investigation and has a fixed period in which to respond.
The working language of the commercial file is English, with Turkish originals maintained for every document that will be filed with a court, an enforcement office or an administrative authority. Broader context for companies entering the market is set out in our overview of Turkish law for foreign investors and businesses, and the full text of the statutes referred to on this page is published by the Presidency at mevzuat.gov.tr.
⚖️ Related Legal Resources
🔹 Contracts and Commercial Relationships
Commercial Contracts in Turkey: supply, distribution, licensing and service agreements drafted against the notice requirements of Article 18 of the Turkish Commercial Code No. 6102.
Franchise Law: territory, post-termination non-competition and customer base treatment in a relationship Turkish law does not separately codify.
Lease and Sales Contracts: drafting and review where the counterparty is a Turkish merchant and the eight-day inspection clock applies.
Corporate Law in Turkey: the company itself, its capital, organs and shareholder relations, as distinct from its transactions with third parties.
🔹 Disputes and Dispute Resolution
Commercial Litigation: proceedings before the commercial courts of first instance following the six-week mandatory mediation stage.
Commercial Contract Disputes: breach, termination and damages claims, including the evidentiary use of statutory commercial books.
Arbitration in Turkey: clause drafting and representation under International Arbitration Law No. 4686 and before the Istanbul Arbitration Centre.
Recognition and Enforcement: foreign judgments under Articles 50 to 59 and arbitral awards under Articles 60 to 63 of Law No. 5718.
🔹 Payment, Enforcement and Insolvency
International Debt Collection: enforcement without a prior judgment, and the seven-day objection window that decides the route.
Debtor Asset Investigation: locating reachable assets before choosing an enforcement strategy.
Bankruptcy and Insolvency: creditor representation once individual enforcement has been suspended by collective proceedings.
🔹 Trade, Customs and Carriage
International Trade and Customs: classification, valuation and penalty disputes under the fifteen-day objection period of the Customs Law No. 4458.
Anti-Dumping Proceedings: exporter and importer representation in Ministry of Trade investigations with fixed questionnaire deadlines.
Trade Law Analysis: the regulatory framework against which import and export disputes are decided.
Transit Trade Tax Exemption: treatment of goods passing through Turkey without entering free circulation.
Maritime Law: cargo claims, carriage disputes and vessel arrest under the maritime trade provisions of the Turkish Commercial Code No. 6102.
Aviation Law: air cargo claims and aviation contracts, including liability allocation between carrier and shipper.
Schedule a Legal Consultation
Whether you are reviewing a Turkish supply agreement before signature, assessing a claim whose statutory deadlines may already be running, or enforcing an award against Turkish assets, our commercial lawyers in Istanbul can set out your position and the sequence of steps that follows.
⚖️ The Clock Nobody Started
At the beginning of this page we said that a foreign company usually meets Turkish commercial law twice, at signature and at the moment something goes wrong, and that clocks run in between without being started by anyone.
That is the whole difficulty in one image. Two days for an obvious defect. Eight days for an invoice. Seven days for a payment order. Fifteen days for a customs assessment. One year for a distributor’s compensation claim. None of these periods is announced, none of them waits for a decision to be made internally, and none of them can be recovered by being right on the merits afterwards.
The work of commercial law in Turkey is mostly the work of knowing which clock is running. Contracts are drafted so that the deadlines are visible before they matter, and disputes are assessed against the calendar before they are assessed against the facts. It is a less dramatic description of the practice than most, and it is the one that decides outcomes.