When goods belonging to you are attached in Türkiye for someone else’s debt, the remedy is the ownership claim (istihkak) under Articles 96 to 99 of the Enforcement and Bankruptcy Law No. 2004 (İİK), and the decisive question is not who holds the invoice but where the goods were standing when the attachment was carried out. That fact allocates the burden of going to court, and it runs on deadlines measured in days rather than months.
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We act on the third-party side of these files: the manufacturer whose machine sits in a distributor’s plant, the lessor of equipment installed on a customer’s site, the consignor whose stock is held in a warehouse it does not control. The work has two halves. The first is reacting correctly to an attachment that has already happened. The second, which is where most of the value lies, is arranging the supply and title documentation so that the goods are not exposed in the first place.
Which regime applies, and who has to sue
Turkish enforcement law splits the contest into tracks with very different risk allocations.
| Position at the moment of seizure | Provision | Who must file | Consequence of inaction |
|---|---|---|---|
| Goods in the debtor's own premises | İİK Arts. 96, 97, 97/a | The owner | Right forfeited in that enforcement proceeding after seven days from awareness |
| Goods held jointly by debtor and third party | İİK Art. 97/a | The owner; the asset is deemed to be in the debtor's hands | Same as above; the presumption operates against the owner |
| Goods solely with a third party asserting a right in rem | İİK Art. 99 | The creditor | Third party's claim deemed accepted if no action within seven days |
| Asset under a registered financial lease | Law No. 6361 Arts. 22, 28/2 | The execution officer decides (Art. 28/2) | Kept outside the proceedings; objection within seven days, decided within one month |
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Article 99 is the comfortable position and it is rarely where a foreign supplier finds itself. Article 97/a is the uncomfortable one: it presumes the holder of a movable to be its owner and then closes the obvious workaround by deeming jointly held goods to be in the debtor’s hands. The presumption is procedural rather than a transfer of title, but in the enforcement file it is the thing that must be overcome. The mechanics of both tracks, including the position of an owner who was never given the chance to make a claim at all under İİK Art. 97/9, are set out step by step in our guide to the third-party ownership claim over seized goods.
Once the claim is entered on the record, İİK Art. 96/2 gives the creditor and the debtor three days to object, and their silence counts as acceptance. If an objection is raised, the file goes to the Enforcement Court, which decides whether the enforcement continues or is stayed. Two points are easily missed: a stay is refused where there are serious grounds to accept that the action is being abused merely to postpone the sale (Art. 97/2), and the decision allowing the enforcement to continue is final (Art. 97/5), so no time can be bought by challenging it. Where a stay is granted, security is taken from the claimant in one of the forms listed in İİK Art. 36, while the ownership action itself is heard under the simplified procedure and ahead of other actions.
The evidence that decides the file
The closing paragraph of İİK Art. 97/a states the test plainly: the claimant must show how the asset was acquired, and the legal and factual reasons requiring it to be in the debtor’s hands, and must prove them. That is a documentary exercise, and it is won with a chain rather than a single instrument. Supply or lease agreement, proforma and commercial invoices, the customs entry declaration, transport documents and the payment trail read together are what an Enforcement Court expects to see. Reconstructing that chain after a seizure is considerably harder than retaining it, which is one reason the customs and import documentation assembled at entry matters long after the goods have cleared.
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Two procedural points shape the tactics. Under İİK Art. 85/2 the debtor, and anyone holding the goods together with the debtor, is obliged to declare a third party’s ownership or pledge right to the officer carrying out the attachment, and the officer is obliged to invite that declaration; the same paragraph provides that such assets, and assets already subject to an ownership claim, are attached last. And under İİK Art. 97/8 the one-year period in İİK Art. 106 within which a sale must be requested does not run while the ownership action is pending.
Retention of title: the formality that decides everything
Turkish property law begins from Art. 763 of the Civil Code No. 4721: transfer of ownership of a movable requires transfer of possession. TMK Art. 985 then presumes the possessor of a movable to be its owner, and TMK Art. 988 protects a good-faith acquirer from a person entrusted with possession even where that person had no authority to dispose. Handing possession to a distributor is therefore a structural risk, not an accidental one.
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Retention of title is the standard answer, and in Türkiye it is answered by form. Under TMK Art. 764 a reservation of ownership is valid only where the agreement is made in official form and registered in the special register of the notary at the transferee’s place of residence; the following sentence excludes sales of animals from the mechanism altogether. Two consequences follow. A reservation printed in the supplier’s general terms and conditions is not a reservation for Turkish purposes, which is why the clause in a standard set of supply terms almost never survives a Turkish enforcement file. And because registration follows the transferee’s residence, a supplier dealing with several Turkish buyers has several registrations to make, each one local to that buyer.
A related trap sits in TMK Art. 766, which allows ownership to pass without physical delivery where the transferor keeps possession under a separate legal relationship. The next sentence removes the comfort: if the arrangement was made to harm third parties or to escape the rules on pledges over movables, the transfer produces no effect, and the judge assesses whether such a purpose was pursued. Sale-and-leaseback style arrangements improvised at the point where a customer is already in difficulty tend to fail on exactly this provision.
Cross-border supply: which law decides the reservation
Foreign suppliers frequently assume that a choice-of-law clause carries their retention of title with the goods. It does not. Art. 21/1 of the Act on Private International and Procedural Law No. 5718 (MÖHUK) subjects ownership and other rights in rem over movables to the law of the country where the goods are located at the time of the transaction. Article 21/2 subjects rights in rem over goods in transit to the law of the place of destination. Article 21/3 provides that, on a change of location, rights in rem not yet acquired are governed by the law of the country where the goods last are.
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Read together, these three paragraphs explain why a reservation that is unimpeachable at the point of shipment can be worth little once the container is discharged in Türkiye. The contractual claim under the chosen law survives; the proprietary claim against an attaching creditor is tested by Turkish law and by TMK Art. 764. Getting this right belongs to the drafting stage, alongside the other allocations of risk we address in commercial contract work and within the wider framework of Turkish commercial law.
Structures that hold, and claimants who may rank ahead
Not every arrangement is equally exposed. A financial lease under Law No. 6361 is the strongest position: Art. 23/1 vests ownership of the leased asset in the lessor, and Art. 28/2 instructs the execution officer, where enforcement is brought against the lessee, to decide that the leased assets are kept outside the proceedings, with an objection available within seven days and decided by the Enforcement Court within one month at the latest under Art. 28/3. The protection rests on registration under Art. 22: the register kept by the Association of Financial Institutions is public, nobody may claim ignorance of an entry in it, and after registration or annotation third parties’ acquisitions of rights in rem over the asset cannot be asserted against the lessor. Agreements concluded from abroad are registered by the Association under Art. 21. One boundary must be checked before relying on any of this: under Art. 2/3 the financial-leasing provisions do not apply to operating leases carried out by leasing companies.
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Consignment sits at the other end. Stock handed voluntarily to a distributor is held by the distributor as entrusted possession, so a buyer who acquires it from the distributor in good faith is protected under TMK Art. 988 even where the distributor had no authority to sell. The five-year recovery action in TMK Art. 989 does not help here: it is reserved for a possessor whose movable was stolen, lost or otherwise left their possession against their will, and even then, where the goods were acquired in good faith at a public auction, at a market or from a dealer in similar goods, the action lies against good-faith acquirers only against reimbursement of the price paid.
Finally, the attaching creditor may not be the only competing claimant. Under Art. 336 of the Code of Obligations No. 6098 (TBK) the landlord of immovable property has a lien over movables on the premises that serve their furnishing or use, securing one year’s accrued and six months’ current rent, though the lien may not be exercised over the tenant’s own goods that are exempt from attachment. TBK Art. 337 gives owners a real defence: third-party rights over goods the landlord knew or should have known did not belong to the tenant rank ahead of the lien, and a landlord who learns during the lease that the goods belong to someone else, and does not terminate for the end of the earliest termination period, loses the lien over them. A dated written notice to the warehouse landlord is therefore a low-cost step with a direct effect on priority.
Our Approach
Our starting point on an attachment is the minute itself, because everything downstream turns on where the goods stood and who was recorded as holding them. From there the sequence is: secure custody so the goods are not removed, put the ownership claim on the record within the statutory window, build the acquisition and possession evidence into a single chain, and take the position through the Enforcement Court, with any related contractual claims against the counterparty pursued separately through commercial litigation or arbitration as the contract provides. Where the mandate is preventive rather than reactive, the same analysis runs backwards: we look at how title, possession and registration are arranged across the supply chain, and at whether the documents would carry the proprietary argument if an attachment arrived tomorrow.
