New Chapter, Same Mission: TBCCI Elects Senem Dedeoğlu as Chairman

After more than four decades as the principal bridge between British and Turkish business communities, the Turkish-British Chamber of Commerce and Industry has a new leadership team. With Senem Dedeoğlu at the helm and a board drawn from some of the most significant names in UK-Turkey commerce, TBCCI is entering 2026 with fresh momentum — and a bilateral relationship that has never been more consequential.

It is a measure of how much the UK-Turkey bilateral relationship has matured that a change of leadership at the Turkish-British Chamber of Commerce and Industry can feel simultaneously routine and significant. Routine, because TBCCI has been doing this work since 1980 — navigating elections, transitions, and the shifting tides of two complex economies — with consistent professionalism. Significant, because the relationship it serves is, right now, at one of the most consequential junctures in its modern history: a Free Trade Agreement in active negotiation, a defence partnership deepening by the quarter, and a diaspora business community of growing confidence and scale.

At the Chamber’s General Assembly in November 2024, members elected a new leadership team to carry that work forward. Senem Dedeoğlu was elected as TBCCI Chairman, taking up the role alongside TBCCI President Alderman Professor Emma Edhem — a combination that brings both fresh energy and deep institutional knowledge to the organisation’s leadership. In the months since, the new board has moved quickly to establish its priorities and its presence.

Who Is Senem Dedeoğlu?

Senem Dedeoğlu brings to the TBCCI chairmanship a professional background that spans finance, business development, and the Turkish-British bilateral relationship at senior level. Her network in both the London business community and the Turkish corporate world is extensive, and her appointment reflects a chamber that is increasingly confident in its own ambitions — not merely facilitating UK-Turkey trade, but actively shaping its direction.

Alongside her TBCCI role, Dedeoğlu is professionally connected to the Turkish and wider international business landscape in London, and her election signals a clear intention to deepen the chamber’s engagement with the sectors — finance, technology, professional services — that are driving the next phase of UK-Turkey economic integration. Her LinkedIn presence, through which she has been actively communicating the chamber’s activities and vision since taking the role, shows a leader who understands that the chamber’s visibility and its commercial effectiveness are inseparable.

“The business community is one of the core pillars of the strategic partnership between the UK and Türkiye. TBCCI’s role is to make that partnership tangible — meeting by meeting, sector by sector, relationship by relationship.”

A New Board for a New Moment

The board assembled around Dedeoğlu is one of the most commercially credible in the chamber’s recent history. The full TBCCI Officers and Board of Directors as constituted following the November 2024 election are as follows:

TBCCI Officers

• Alderman Prof. Emma Edhem  —  TBCCI President, Alderman, Barrister
• Senem Dedeoğlu  —  TBCCI Chairman
• Ersan Söğüt  —  TBCCI Vice Chairman, Ziraat Bank Director
• Kaan Dündar  —  TBCCI Vice Chairman, Vestel Finance Director
• Ravindra Goonesena  —  TBCCI Company Secretary, Fladgate LLP Partner
• Altan Kemal  —  TBCCI Treasurer, Alton & Co Director
• Board of Directors
• Çiğdem Çekceoğlu  —  Director, Eren Holding
• Evren Çelik  —  Partner, GREYMORE
• Mehmet Gurulkan  —  London General Manager, Turkish Airlines
• İlkiz Günel Gümüş  —  Partner, Brooks Lawford
• Dr. Yıldız Tuğba Kara  —  Founder & Managing Director, Society 5.0 Institute
• Kutan Kudret  —  Head of Commercial Banking, ISBANK
• Özge Öz  —  Director, EY
• Gülen Şahin  —  Director / Senior Legal Advisor, Bucks Legal Group Limited
• Emre Şeker  —  Operations Manager, OPET
• Arzu Tören  —  Global Head ECAs & Blended Finance, ERG International Group

The board’s composition tells its own story. Banking is represented through both Ziraat Bank and ISBANK — the two most significant Turkish financial institutions with a UK presence. Aviation is represented through Turkish Airlines. Finance and professional services appear through EY, Fladgate LLP, and GREYMORE. Energy is present through OPET and ERG. Industrial and holding company interests come through Eren Holding and Vestel. Legal expertise is embedded across multiple members. The breadth is deliberate: TBCCI’s effectiveness depends on its ability to convene across sectors, and this board can do that.

The Activities: From the Turkish Consul General to EY

Since the new board took office, the chamber’s pace of activity has been notably high. In October 2025, TBCCI visited Ambassador Assoc. Prof. Dr. Hasan Ulusoy, Consul General of the Republic of Türkiye in London — a meeting that reinforced the close working relationship between the chamber and the Turkish diplomatic presence in the UK. Days later, the Turkish British business community gathered at the London offices of EY, a TBCCI patron member, for a networking event that brought together members from across the chamber’s broad sectoral range.

Earlier in 2025, the chamber was active on both sides of the Aegean. A meeting with KAGIDER — the Women Entrepreneurs Association of Türkiye — underscored TBCCI’s commitment to ensuring that the UK-Turkey bilateral relationship is inclusive of the full breadth of Turkish business talent, including its most dynamic emerging constituency of women-led enterprises. A delegation visit from Izmir Chamber of Commerce brought the UK-Turkey relationship to one of Turkey’s most commercially significant regional economies.

The chamber also co-organised, alongside the Foreign Economic Relations Board (DTİK), the ‘Power of AI: Transforming Your Business’ event at the Turkish Embassy in London in February 2025 — an event that drew over 100 industry leaders, business professionals, and technology experts to examine the impact of artificial intelligence on business growth and strategic decision-making. Speakers included Serpil Timuray, CEO of Vodafone Investments, and Zehra Chatoo, Strategic Planning Partner at META Leadership Team. The event was a marker of TBCCI’s ambition to position itself at the intersection of technology, business, and the UK-Turkey relationship — not merely as a trade facilitator but as a convener of genuine strategic dialogue.

“Growth and profitability now rely on AI as a key driver. Businesses must merge AI with their data to unlock full potential.”

The Bigger Picture: TBCCI and the FTA

The chamber’s work takes on heightened importance given the state of the UK-Turkey Free Trade Agreement negotiations. The first round concluded positively in 2025, and further rounds are expected to expand the agreement’s coverage into services and innovation-led sectors — precisely the areas where TBCCI’s board has the most expertise and the deepest networks. The Department for Business and Trade has already engaged TBCCI directly in discussions about the FTA’s development, recognising the chamber’s unique position as the primary institutional voice for bilateral trade interests on the UK side.

The patron member roster confirms the chamber’s standing at the highest levels of UK-Turkey commerce. Turkish Airlines, Vestel, Eren Holding, PETOIL, ERG International, NAZALI, Limak, Fladgate LLP, Ziraat Bank, ISBANK, GREYMORE, Acibadem International, Brooks Lawford, Acun Medya, LBBW, Oracle Law, Şişecam, and Kabine Law — the list reads as a who’s who of the bilateral relationship, spanning aviation, manufacturing, energy, banking, legal services, healthcare, and media. Each of these organisations has chosen to anchor its UK-Turkey engagement through TBCCI, and each brings relationships and capabilities that amplify the chamber’s convening power.

44 Years On — and Only Getting Started

TBCCI was founded in 1980, in a very different world. The Turkey of 1980 was pre-liberalisation, pre-Özal, pre-customs union, and pre-digital. The UK of 1980 was pre-Thatcher’s economic revolution, pre-City of London’s Big Bang, and pre-the internet that now connects Turkish entrepreneurs in Gaziantep with British investors in Canary Wharf in real time. The world in which TBCCI operates today is unrecognisable from the one in which it was founded — and yet the fundamental mission has not changed: to connect, to facilitate, to build.

What has changed, under the new leadership, is the ambition of how that mission is expressed. The TBCCI of 2026 is not merely a service organisation for existing bilateral trade — it is, increasingly, a strategic actor in the development of a relationship that both governments have identified as a priority. With a FTA in negotiation, a defence partnership expanding, and a diaspora business community that is more confident, better connected, and more commercially sophisticated than at any previous moment, the chamber’s role has never been more important.

For TBMag, which has been covering this relationship since our first issue, the arrival of Senem Dedeoğlu’s leadership team represents something genuinely worth celebrating. Not because everything is perfect — the UK-Turkey relationship has its frictions and its complications, and TBMag will continue to report on those honestly — but because the infrastructure of that relationship is in good hands. We look forward to covering what this new chapter brings.

ABOUT TBCCI

The Turkish British Chamber of Commerce and Industry (TBCCI) was founded in London in 1980 as a non-profit organisation to promote, protect, and extend bilateral trade and investment between the UK, Türkiye, and Northern Cyprus. It is headquartered at Spaces Shoreditch, 25 City Road, London EC1Y 1AA. Services include document certification, business networking and event organisation, and access to a network spanning finance, energy, aviation, manufacturing, legal services, healthcare, and technology sectors. tbcci.org