Özdemir Sabancı
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Özdemir Sabancı, born May 15, 1941 in Adana, Turkey, was a businessman and a member of the Sabancı family in the second generation.
After finising the high school at the Tarsus American College in Tarsus, Adana, Özdemir received his B.A. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST), UK. Later, he obtained a master's degree in the same discipline in Switzerland.
Returned to Turkey, he worked in the Sabancı Holding and soon founded and further developed the synthetic fibres producer Sasa, one of the biggest industrial companies of the group. Under his leadership, Sabancı Holding entered into the automative sector. He established several joint-venture projects with major Japanese companies including production of Mitsubishi coaches and trucks, Komatsu construction equipment, loaders and forklifts. In 1990, he paved the way to produce Toyota cars in Turkey as a consequence of the largest Turkish-Japanese partnership.
In the board of directors of the holding, he was responsible for the Group of Synthetic Fibers, Automotive and Plastics.
Özdemir Sabancı was gunned down on January 9, 1996 in his office in the strongly guarded Sabancı Towers in Levent, İstanbul along with the general manager of ToyotaSA and a secretary by assassins hired by the leftist armed group DHKP-C. They had been given access to the building by Fehriye Erdal, a female member of DHKP-C, who was an employee at that time.
He was succeeded by his wife Sevda, his son Demir and his daughter Serra (1975).
