MERKUR HOLDING LAYS OFF 70% OF STAFF UNTIL NEXT FEBRUARY
MERKUR HOLDING (Turkey) intends to lay off 70% of its staff within the next year. And by October 2026, less than a quarter of the current staff will remain in the company. Co-owner of Merkur Holding Halis Din stated this in an “exclusive comment to BLACKLIST.AERO”.
In addition, according to Din, Merkur will completely refuse to serve regular passenger airlines, focusing on business aviation and cargo charters.
Such revelations of Halis Din to his worst enemy may seem to you if not a joke, then deliberate misinformation. However, the circumstances under which Halis Din announced the upcoming layoffs will give you a more realistic picture of what is happening. And your scepticism will disappear.
As you have already had the “pleasure” to see, Halis Din advertises BLACKLIST.AERO with enviable regularity, distributing videos with fabricated accusations against me personally and my team. But at the same time runs away from direct public contact
He believes that in this way he can undermine trust in us, in my words and actions. Practice proves the opposite, negative publicity turned out to be even bigger advertising for us.
However, apart from this, Halis sends me messages on WhatsApp with even greater regularity of such an offensive nature that some people’s eyes may pop out. Usually, messages from Halis Din can be more interesting to psychotherapists and sexologists for professional analysis by their profile:
[18:02, 30.01.2025] Halis Din - Merkur Holding: I m sure you born after quick, low quality sex or may be rape! Thats the reason for wrong production
My phone is full of similar “outpouring of the soul” from Halis. Usually, during such psychic attacks, I imagine myself as a doctor in a mental hospital and think of such stuff with a purely academic interest (such characters will take their place in my future book).
But when Halis once again decided to show his most primitive and lowly qualities, I decided to ask his opinion regarding the information I’ve just received that on February 12 he fired five people from the Operation team at once.
Apparently, the fact that this information reached me so quickly so dumbfounded Halis that he began to reveal one fact after another:
[21:42, 13.02.2025] Halis Din - Merkur Holding: We try to become smaller thats all
[21:42, 13.02.2025] Halis Din - Merkur Holding: If so how still i have 135 guys :)
Halis also advised that he has a clear plan for personnel reductions until October 2026:
[21:44, 13.02.2025] Halis Din - Merkur Holding: My plan is Oct 70 guys
Next Feb 40 Guy next Oct 30 guys
[21:46, 13.02.2025] Halis Din - Merkur Holding: Because i m over targetted amount money and step by step we will go smaller
In addition, Halis said that MERKUR HOLDING will refuse to serve regular passenger airlines:
[21:47, 13.02.2025] Halis Din - Merkur Holding: We will handle only Private Jet + Cargo Caharters after Oct 2025. We will not work with regular commercial airlines who needs finance
Such plans look quite reasonable. Certainly, the greatest expectations of Halis Din are related to the probable restoration of air traffic with Ukraine. Which, in turn, gives him a hope that Halis’s shadow partner Victor Sherman will be able to continue his activities and continue to import clothes into Ukraine according to the schemes previously described by other journalists (of course, if we believe all these “journalists”, who for some reason do not hide their names under the articles).
But taking into account that Halis Din’s connection with Victor Sherman was actually revealed by him personally, in the future the service of any cargo flights to Ukraine by the Merkur company may cause unhealthy (or vice versa - healthy) interest from the Turkish and Ukrainian customs authorities. However, it should be noted here that these are only my assumptions, healthy skepticism so to speak...
At the same time, Halis Din tried to convince me that the company’s debts are not the reason for layoffs at the company:
[21:47, 13.02.2025] Halis Din - Merkur Holding: All going as planned
[21:48, 13.02.2025] Halis Din - Merkur Holding: Artem if i want i will pay
Well, honestly, such a plan is quite reasonable in terms of MERKUR HOLDING’s multimillion-dollar debts. Although last time, Halis Din refused to comment on the information that the Directorate of Istanbul Ground Airport filed a lawsuit in court to recover more than 5 million dollars, which Merkur owes for the services rendered.
Nevertheless, in the terms of another information received from the sources, that in January, Halis asked the IGA management for a 36-month installment of the debt, and they refused him in such a long period of debt payment, the announced plans of Halis Din seem quite justified.
A different matter is that the nature and manner of actions of the co-owner of MERKUR HOLDING leads rather not to a planned and controlled reduction, but to an uncontrolled collapse of the company. If previously only a few people dared to steal clients from MERKUR - who out of respect, who out of fear, and now competitors of MERKUR in Turkey, have observed the events of the last few months and the public resonance it has, are no longer shy and are not afraid to carry out aggressive advertising campaigns for clients (often already former) of MERKUR.
Please read more about MERKUR's cases at the BLACKLIST.AERO Register: MERKUR – THE NEW THREE CASES DEFAULTER. IT’S TIME FOR HALIS DIN TO GO
Artem Degtiarov, Chief editor at BLACKLIST.AERO
The covert bankruptcy—legally framed as a “restructuring”—of SIA SmartLynx Airlines (Latvia), along with the highly probable collapse of SmartLynx Malta and SmartLynx Estonia in the near future, has become more than just a landmark event for the aviation market. Its consequences may amount to a full-fledged default tsunami, triggering a cascade of multimillion-euro non-payments across the industry.
Every time I fly to Dubai for exhibitions, I witness the same scene outside the hotels. A Bugatti or Lamborghini pulls up to the entrance, the chauffeur steps out, and hands the wheel to someone walking out of the lobby. It looks predictable — after all, Dubai is exactly the place where many people dream of cruising down Sheikh Zayed Road in a hypercar, showing off status and wealth.
BLACKLIST.AERO is publishing a full list of creditors of SIA SmartLynx Airlines (Latvia). We got it from several sources at once. This list was sent to all creditors by the airline itself along with an official letter informing that SmartLynx started the creditor protection procedure.
The BLACKLIST.AERO Registry Administration has received a full register of creditors of SMARTLYNX AIRLINES (Latvia), which until recently was part of the AVIA SOLUTIONS GROUP holding. In this list, 781 companies are listed as creditors. The amount of debt is truly amazing: more than 238 million euros.
