What Article 15 of the Municipality Law actually shields, the ten-day step the enforcement office must take before any attachment, why the burden of proof sits on the municipality, and where the İYUK thirty-day payment rule comes first.
A Turkish municipality is not immune from enforcement. It is a legal person, it can be sued, its assets can be attached, and a creditor who is owed money on a works or supply contract collects from it through the ordinary enforcement machinery. What the law creates is a narrow, four-category immunity in Article 15 of the Municipality Law No. 5393, plus one procedural step that has no equivalent against a private debtor: before any attachment decision, the enforcement office must ask the municipality to show sufficient attachable assets, and the municipality has ten days to answer. Understanding exactly what those four categories cover — and what the Constitutional Court removed from the ten-day rule in 2015 — is the difference between a file that produces money and a file that produces a year of non-attachability complaints.
What Article 15 actually shields
The operative sentence is short and exhaustive. In the official text, a municipality’s revenues obtained through project-backed borrowing, conditional donations and assets actually used in public services, together with the tax, duty and fee revenue collected by the municipality, cannot be attached. Four categories, nothing more.
Two misconceptions cause most wasted effort. The first is that municipal property is state property. Article 15 does say that whoever commits an offence against municipal assets is deemed to have committed an offence against state property, and that Article 75 of the Public Tender Law No. 2886 — the ecrimisil mechanism for occupation of state immovables — applies to municipal immovables as well. Both are true, and neither imports the state-property immunity in Article 82(1)(1) of the Enforcement and Bankruptcy Law No. 2004 into the municipal balance sheet. The first is a criminal-law characterisation; the second is a recovery tool the municipality uses against occupiers.
The second misconception runs the other way: that anything a municipality labels “allocated to public service” is untouchable. The test in the statute is actually used in a public service, which on its wording is a question of fact, not of labels. Article 15, like Article 82 of the Enforcement and Bankruptcy Law, lists what cannot be attached, so anything outside the list remains attachable, and the burden of proving that a seized asset falls inside the immunity sits on the municipality: under Article 190 of Civil Procedure Law No. 6100 the burden lies on the party deriving a right from the fact alleged. For money, the categories that matter are the revenue categories (tax, duty and fee revenue collected by the municipality, conditional donations and project-backed borrowing proceeds), so what the municipality has to show is that the balance is one of them. What matters is where that balance came from.
Two neighbouring provisions are routinely misread into the immunity. Article 15 also directs that the municipality’s receivables for natural gas, water, waste water and services are collected under private-law provisions, and Article 16 grants the municipality’s immovables that are allocated to a public service or open to public use and that generate no income an exemption from every kind of tax, duty, fee and contribution share, value added tax and special consumption tax excepted. The second of those is a tax rule; being exempt from a levy says nothing about whether an asset can be attached. It is also worth knowing who rules on the point first: the final paragraph of Article 82 of the Enforcement and Bankruptcy Law makes the enforcement officer assess whether the assets or rights whose attachment is requested are capable of being attached, and accept or reject the request accordingly. That is a stage at which the creditor has to justify the request — showing from the outset which of the four protected categories the targeted item does not fall into avoids a refusal that puts the file back by months.
| Asset or revenue | Position under Article 15 | What decides it in practice |
|---|---|---|
| Proceeds of project-backed borrowing (including foreign credit drawn for a named infrastructure project) | Protected | The loan documentation and the dedicated account; Article 15 names these revenues expressly, so a separate project account makes the proof easier. |
| Conditional donations | Protected | The donation instrument and the condition attached to it. |
| Tax, duty and fee revenue collected by the municipality | Protected | Traceability of the specific funds; mixing them with other money makes the proof harder. |
| Assets actually used in a public service | Protected only while the factual use continues | Actual use, established by evidence; the statutory test is use, not an allocation decision. |
| Commercial revenues, rents, receivables from third parties, non-service vehicles and plant, surplus immovables | Not protected | The general rule applies: attachable, subject to the amount-of-claim limit. |
| Share of general-budget tax collections | Contested | Law No. 5779 deems the share to be tax; Article 15 protects tax "collected by the municipality". Argue it, do not assume it. |
The ten-day step, and the two phrases that no longer exist
The paragraph added to Article 15 by Law No. 6552 in 2014 reads, in its current official form: before an attachment decision is taken by the enforcement office, the municipality is asked to show assets capable of attachment sufficient to cover the debt. Where sufficient assets are not declared within ten days, the attachment to be carried out may not be effected in a manner exceeding the amount of the claim.
Read the parentheses in the official text and the position becomes much better for creditors than the paragraph first appears. The first sentence originally continued “and the attachment shall be applied only on the assets so shown”; the second originally barred attachment “or in a manner that would disrupt public services”. The Constitutional Court annulled both phrases in 2015. The consequences are concrete:
- The enforcement office is not confined to the assets the municipality names. A declaration is information, not a binding selection.
- Disruption of a public service is no longer a statutory ground to lift an attachment. The only surviving quantitative limit is that the attachment may not exceed the amount claimed.
- Where the declared assets do not cover the claim, the text treats that in the same way as a failure to declare, because its condition is that sufficient assets are not declared: attachment proceeds on other assets.
The same 2015 decision annulled the transitional provision that would have applied the paragraph to enforcement files already running and would have lifted attachments imposed before it came into force on 11 September 2014. Attachments from that period are therefore not lifted under it; for files opened since then, which today means in practice all of them, the paragraph applies in full.
One trap deserves naming. The ten-day period in Article 15 is not the declaration of assets in the Enforcement and Bankruptcy Law. The latter has its own content and its own clocks: seven days from a payment order under Article 60, seven days from a judgment-based enforcement order under Article 32, and three days from service of a decision annulling or lifting an objection under Article 75. The Article 15 request is an additional, municipality-specific step that sits in front of the attachment decision.
Bank accounts, pooled funds and who has to prove what
Most municipal enforcement files are decided in a bank account. Money reaches the account by a third-party attachment notice served on the bank under Article 89 of the Enforcement and Bankruptcy Law, and the municipality answers with a non-attachability complaint to the enforcement court. At that point the municipality must show that the balance is protected revenue (Article 190, Law No. 6100). Where its accounts hold protected and unprotected money together, in a continuously operating account with constant deposits and withdrawals, that showing becomes difficult, because the remaining balance can no longer be traced to one source. A creditor in that position will argue that a municipality which created the mixed account itself cannot benefit from the uncertainty, relying on the duty of good faith and on the rule in Article 2 of Civil Code No. 4721 that the legal order does not protect the manifest abuse of a right; whether that argument succeeds is decided by the court on the records of the specific account. The inquiry is granular: statement by statement, entry by entry, including internal transfers between accounts at the same bank.
The mirror-image risk for creditors is just as real. Where money is in fact collected out of an account the municipality can later show to be protected, the creditor should expect that collection to be challenged. A creditor who pushes an attachment through on an account it has reason to believe is a project-loan account is therefore financing a second round of litigation against itself.
Procedurally, the complaint goes to the enforcement court. Article 16 of the Enforcement and Bankruptcy Law sets seven days from the day the act complained of is learned, with no time limit where the complaint is that a right is not being performed or is being left in abeyance. Neither side should rely on the calendar here — the practical rule is to act at once. The general sequencing of objection periods, revival actions and attachment deadlines is set out in our guide to debt collection and enforcement in Türkiye, and it applies to a municipal debtor unchanged except for the Article 15 overlay.
When the judgment comes from an administrative court
Not every claim against a municipality lands in the civil courts. Contracts concluded under the public procurement regime are governed by private law — the Public Procurement Contracts Law No. 4735 provides that where it is silent the Code of Obligations applies — so unpaid progress payments and similar claims are ordinary civil claims. Disputes about administrative acts and administrative contracts are not, and there the payment mechanism in Article 28 of the Administrative Procedure Law No. 2577 applies first.
The first paragraph of that article requires the administration to act on a judgment without delay, and in any event within a period that can never exceed thirty days from service of the judgment on it. The second paragraph then moves the starting point for money. The sum awarded, together with attorney fees and litigation costs, is paid into the bank account that the claimant or the claimant’s lawyer notifies to the defendant administration in writing, and the text is explicit that payment is made as from the date of that notification, within the procedure and periods laid down in the first paragraph. In other words the thirty days do not start with service of the judgment; they start when the account details reach the administration. A creditor who counts from service will open enforcement before the administration is even in default. If payment is not made within those periods, the same paragraph provides that the judgment is executed and enforced under the general provisions, and the file returns to the machinery described above. Article 28 also prices the delay: on compensation and tax claims the administration pays interest for the period between service of the judgment and payment, at the deferral-interest rate set under Article 48 of Law No. 6183 — but no interest runs for the period between service of the judgment on the claimant and the date the bank account is notified to the administration. The notification letter is therefore not only a condition of payment; it is the moment the clock starts running in the creditor’s favour. Article 28 also preserves a separate action in damages against the administration where a judgment is not implemented.
| Stage | Period | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Administration to comply with an administrative court judgment (acts and measures) | Without delay; never more than 30 days from service on the administration | Law No. 2577 Art. 28(1) |
| Administration to pay a money judgment, attorney fees and litigation costs | Same periods, but running from the date the bank account is notified to the administration in writing | Law No. 2577 Art. 28(2) |
| Contractor's objection to the contracting authority in works contracts | Until final acceptance is completed; forwarded to the Yüksek Fen Kurulu within 30 days, decided within 60 | Law No. 4735 Additional Art. 2 |
| Municipality to object to an ordinary payment order | 7 days from service | Law No. 2004 Art. 62 |
| Creditor to revive a stopped file | 1 year (action to annul the objection) or 6 months (application to lift it on a qualifying document) | Law No. 2004 Arts. 67, 68 |
| Municipality to declare attachable assets | 10 days from the enforcement office's request | Law No. 5393 Art. 15 |
| Complaint to the enforcement court against an act | 7 days from learning of it | Law No. 2004 Art. 16 |
What this means for a contractor or supplier
Three practical consequences follow, and they are worth building into the file from the first day rather than discovering at the attachment stage.
First, the security package matters more than the immunity does. A waiver of non-attachability written into the contract is worthless: Article 83/a of the Enforcement and Bankruptcy Law voids agreements made in advance that assets covered by Articles 82 and 83 may be attached. Retentions, guarantees and payment mechanics are where the protection actually lives — and when a guarantee is called, or wrongly called, the analysis moves to the separate ground covered in our guide to bank guarantee letters, injunctions and unfair encashment.
Second, the direction of travel of the public-receivables regime is one-way. Article 1 of the Law on Collection Procedure of Public Receivables No. 6183 covers taxes, duties, fees and similar receivables belonging to the state, special provincial administrations and municipalities, and expressly excludes those arising from contract, tort and unjust enrichment. It is a tool that a public creditor uses; it is never a route for a private creditor to use against a municipality, and it does not even cover a municipality’s own contractual claims. The same protection under Article 15 extends to metropolitan and district municipalities through Article 28 of the Metropolitan Municipality Law No. 5216.
Third, sequencing decides the outcome. Classify the claim, exhaust the contractual objection route where the works-contract regime provides one, make the İYUK notification in writing if the award is administrative, then open the file, then insist that the enforcement office issues and dockets the Article 15 request, and only then attach — targeting revenues and receivables whose character can be established from documents. That sequencing is the substance of what our commercial debt collection practice and our commercial litigation and arbitration practice do on municipal files, and it is also why the file that looks slowest at the start is usually the one that pays.
Rates and thresholds move. Statutory interest under Law No. 3095 is now set by formula rather than by a fixed figure — eighty per cent of the Central Bank’s short-term credit rediscount rate as at 31 December of the preceding year, with a mid-year adjustment where the rate has moved by five points or more — and in commercial affairs the higher short-term advance rate may be claimed. Check the rate in force for the year in question rather than carrying a figure forward.
