At the İkitelli City Hospital's construction site in İstanbul, approximately one thousand workers stopped working to protest the unhealthy food in the cafeteria and bad housing conditions on January, 21. On the other hand, the owner of the Rönesans Holding, Erman Ilıcak, ranks second in Turkey's richest people list. Ilıcak doubled his wealth in two years with the public tenders he won during the AKP government.
Rönesans Holding, one of the companies that become richer with the city hospitals projects realized by the public-private partnership (PPP) model, has completed the constructions of the city hospitals of Adana, Yozgat, Elazığ so far. The constructions of Bursa and İstanbul-İkitelli city hospitals are still ongoing.
In February 2018, a worker dismissed from the company's headquarters in Ankara was interviewed by soL news. The worker asserted that Rönesans Holding was taking advantage of the lack of public inspections in the city hospitals projects, besides benefiting from the non-transparent public tender processes.
"While the cost of the project is recorded as 70 billion, it becomes 15 billion in effect by changing the supply costs after the project starts. Rönesans Holding is making a profit with less quality material and this process is not going under an inspection, while it is approved by someone. They think they can do the construction projects with fewer numbers of experts because they do not go through a control mechanism", the worker told.
Erman Ilıcak, the owner of Rönesans Holding, increased his 2 billion dollars worth wealth in 2016 to 4 billion dollars in 2018 and became the second richest person of Turkey in Forbes' list.
Founded in Russia in 1993, Rönesans construction company is one of the capitalist groups in Turkey that has grown with the public tenders it received during the AKP period. Erman Ilıcak is also known as the "peacemaker" in between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Tayyip Erdoğan.
