Bank (Ottoman Turkish: Osmanlı İtibar-ı Millî Bankası) on 11 March 1917. However, the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in the First World War prevented the bank from becoming a national bank, which would have assumed central bank functions. The Republican Period After the First World War, on account of the global trend of nations to formulate their monetary policies independently by establishing their respective central banks, which would be authorized to issue money, and to reinforce the political independence gained in the War of Independence with economic independence, deliberations about the establishment of a central bank in Turkey gained pace. This issue was first addressed in the 1923 Izmir Economic Congress with a special emphasis on founding a “national state bank”. In 1927, the Minister of Finance Abdülhalik Renda submitted a draft bill on the establishment of a central bank. Following the enactment of the law, Turkey exchanged views with the central banks of other countries’ in establishing the Turkish Central Bank. In 1928, having been invited to Turkey, Gerard Vissering, a member of the Central Bank of Netherlands, board of governors, highlighted in his report the necessity of an independent central bank not affiliated to the Government; espoused, in 1929, by Italian expert Count Volpi who suggested that the establishment of a central bank was necessary to ensure stability of the Turkish currency. Following these developments, the Government took the initiative to draft the necessary legal framework for the establishment of a central bank, and a draft was prepared for the Central Bank with the contributions of Prof. Leon Morf from the University of Lausanne. The law was enacted by the Grand National Assembly of Turkey on 11 June 1930, and published in the Official Gazette of 30 June 1930 under the name “The Law on the Central Bank of the Republic of Turkey No. 1715”. Following the centralization of duties carried out by various institutions and organizations, the Central Bank started to function on 3 October 1931. The shares of the Bank, which acquired legal status as a joint stock company; - to manifest that ‘it is not a public entity’, and that ‘it is independent’, were divided into (A), (B), (C) and (D) classes. Class (A) shares belong solely to the Treasury, and, for the purpose of strengthening the Bank's independence, it is stipulated in the Law No. 1715 that these shares shall not constitute more than