The U.K.’s National Crime Agency (NCA) announced on Monday the forfeiture of a luxurious London townhouse and a golf club belonging to the wife of an Azerbaijani state banker who is serving a 16-year prison sentence in Baku for embezzling over three billion dollars.
Whilst Jahangir Hajiyev looted the bank he chaired, his wife Zamira enjoyed a lavish lifestyle in London, flying in a US$42 million private jet, filling her cellar with the world’s most expensive wines, and spending $21 million at the famous Harrods department store over a period of 10 years.
Hajiyeva made headlines in 2018 when she became the subject of the U.K.’s first-ever Unexplained Wealth Order (UWO). The NCA asked her to explain the source of her suspiciously large fortune. Failure to do so would result in her losing her properties.
First went the jewelry.
In November 2018, the NCA seized $500,000 worth of jewelry from a London auction house where they were being valued for Hajiyeva’s daughter. Then in January 2019, the NCA confiscated a $1.5 million Cartier ring Hajiyeva received as a gift from her husband.
Now Hajiyeva has agreed to forfeit her $17.8 million home in London’s Knightsbridge, as well as a golf club in Ascot, Berkshire. Both properties were temporarily frozen by the NCA in 2018. The agency applied for a full property freezing order in March 2021, followed by a civil recovery order in June 2023. London’s High Court granted the NCA’s civil recovery order last Thursday.
The NCA believes both the house and the golf club were obtained as a direct result of large-scale fraud, embezzlement, false accounting, and money laundering. UWOs give U.K. law enforcement agencies the power to target suspected corrupt wealth.
According to the NCA’s statement on Monday, while the High Court concluded that Hajiyeva’s properties were purchased as a result of criminal activity, it didn’t make any finding regarding “Mrs. Hajiyeva’s knowledge of how the properties were paid for.” Hajiyeva was not personally a respondent to the UWO obtained in relation to the golf club.
Lawyers for Hajiyeva told the Guardian that “the settlement involved no finding of fact by the court about our client’s knowledge or state of mind, still less involvement, in relation to these properties.” They added that Hajiyeva had settled because the inability to obtain documents from her jailed husband that were “potentially crucial to the case” had made it “impossible to defend [the proceedings]”. The lawyers said they had been denied access to Hajiyev in prison.
Hajiyeva’s husband served as chairman of the state-owned International Bank of Azerbaijan (IBA) from 2001 until 2015. He was arrested by the Azerbaijani authorities in December 2015, and later convicted in 2016 of misappropriation, abuse of office, large-scale fraud and embezzlement and sentenced to 15 years in prison.
In 2019, Hajiyev faced further charges, mostly relating to suspected embezzlement at IBA’s Moscow subsidiary. An Azerbaijani court once again convicted him, extending his total sentence by a year and a half. The court ruled that during his tenure as IBA’s chairman, Hajiyev extracted money from the bank through the purchase and sale of simple promissory notes with companies registered outside of Azerbaijan.
As a result, “922 contracts were concluded with 69 companies, based predominantly in foreign jurisdictions, often those with weak anti-money laundering controls. Transactions were reportedly concluded without properly assessing those companies in terms of financial stability and solvency, scope of activities, credit history, etc.,” the court ruled.
Hajiyev denied the accusations against him.
OCCRP has reported heavily on goings-on at IBA, which was a central element in investigations of a money-laundering operation that went through companies in the U.K., known as the Azerbaijani Laundromat.
During its investigation, the NCA identified several examples of funds derived from the state bank transferred through multiple accounts “in ways consistent with common money laundering practices.”
According to the agency, the purchase of the golf club was conducted through a complex structure of companies registered in Luxembourg and Guernsey, and by using “offshore trusts in Guernsey and later, Cyprus.” Virtually all of the funds used to purchase the Knightsbridge house “are believed to have come from two specific IBA accounts.”
“No reasonable explanation was provided to the NCA for the source of funds used to purchase either property. A significant proportion could be traced directly to sums generated by promissory notes and loan agreements used to conceal the theft of IBA monies,” the NCA wrote in their statement.
The NCA explained to OCCRP that they will sell the properties and give 70% of the net sale proceeds to the U.K. government – minus the agency’s legal costs – and return 30% to Hajiyeva.
(Photo: U.K. National Crime Agency, License)
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