In October 1998, World Leather magazine ran a story on Turkish tanner and leather producer, Cengiz Sinal a modern-day Levantine trader who sourced baby buffalo hides for processing into finished skins for handbags, shoes and small accessories for his European customers. To recap, when Sinal learned that Italians were buying these skins as crust, he offered them the finished skins, at similar prices, which he processed from wet blue at his own tannery in Tuzla. At the time, Sinal noted that he seemed to have few competitors.

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