The £43m-a-year President, his 'shopaholic' wife and their £2,000 per roll silk wallpaper in the bathroom: Inside Turkey tyrant's £500million palace... so dripping in gold 'it would have even made Saddam blush'

She claims to lead a 'humble and modest' life in the kitchen fermenting apple peel to make vinegar, but the lavish spending of Turkey dictator Recep Erdogan's wife is well known. Emine Erdogan's jet-set lifestyle is a whirlwind of one shopping trip after another where her particular passions are designer clothes and expensive antiques. According to Forbes magazine her husband, 62 (below inset with his wife) topped the list of the highest paid political figure with his earnings put at £43.2million. Meanwhile as a quarter of Turkey's people live in extreme poverty and two million on just £3-a-day, the mother-of-four once shut an entire shopping centre in Brussels for one of her sprees and splurged £37,000 on antiques in Warsaw, Poland. The couple live in their £500million 'White Palace' in the foothills of the Turkish capital, Ankara (top inset) which has opulent interiors similar to state-owned palaces.

Shopaholic: Turkey dictator Recep Erdogan's wife Emine (left) claims to live a 'humble and modest' life with strict Muslim values, whiling away the hours in palace kitchen fermenting apples and turning them into vinegar
 No expense spared: Critics of the monstrous building have said it is so extravagant that it would have made Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, known for his love of gold and jewel encrusted fittings, blush

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