The wife of a banker who was jailed in Azerbaijan for fraud and embezzlement has agreed to surrender a £14 million house in London and a golf club to the National Crime Agency.
Zamira Hajiyeva, who is chronicled as having spent £16 million at Harrods over the space of 10 years, has given up the house in Knightsbridge and the golf club in Ascot following a civil recovery investigation by the NCA.
Her husband, Jahangir Hajiyev, was the chairman of the state-controlled International Bank of Azerbaijan (IBA) between 2001 and 2015 but is currently serving a 16-year jail sentence in the Azeri capital, Baku.
In June 2023 the NCA filed a claim for civil recovery at the High Court in London.
Wife Was First To Be Served
Hajiyeva was the first person made subject to an unexplained wealth order (UWO) in 2019.UWOs were introduced in January 2018 under what have been dubbed McMafia laws, named after a BBC drama about the Russian mafia, and the book by journalist Misha Glenny which inspired it.
The NCA, which conducted a six-year investigation into the Hajiyev family, said they believed the house and golf club were, “obtained as a direct result of large-scale fraud and embezzlement, false accounting and money laundering.”
Hajiyev was convicted in Azerbaijan in 2016 of misappropriation, abuse of office, fraud and embezzlement in connection with his tenure at the IBA.
Three years later he was convicted of further embezzlement from an IBA subsidiary bank in Moscow.
Tim Quarrelle, the NCA’s branch commander for asset denial, said: “NCA officers worked tirelessly to track the complex movement of these funds across the international banking system, through shell companies in multiple jurisdictions, in order to ascertain their source.”
“This result comes almost six and a half years after we served Mrs. Hajiyeva with the first unexplained wealth order ever granted, and highlights our commitment to using all the tools at our disposal to combat the flow of illicit money into, and through, the UK,” he added.
In a press release sent by email, the NCA said their investigators, “subsequently identified numerous examples of funds derived from the IBA being transferred through multiple accounts in ways consistent with common money laundering practices.”
They said this was done by a close associate of Hajiyev, acting on his behalf.
Large sums of money were moved between bank accounts in the British Virgin Islands, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Panama, Cyprus and Luxembourg, and then the money used to buy assets for the family.
Golf Club Bought Through Offshore Trusts
The purchase of Mill Ride golf club in Ascot was, “conducted through a complex structure of Luxembourg and Guernsey-registered companies, and by using offshore trusts in Guernsey and later, Cyprus.”The NCA said most of the money used to purchase the Knightsbridge house came from two IBA accounts.
The funds were transferred to Britain by way of an array of bank accounts in Cyprus, Estonia and Switzerland.
A British Virgin Islands company owned by one of Hajiyev’s associates was used to purchase the house, before the property was transferred into an offshore trust also set up in the British Virgin Islands, said the NCA.
In 2013 then-Prime Minister David Cameron wrote to the leader of the British Virgin Islands and nine other crown dependencies and British overseas territories urging them to “get their own houses in order” in regard to tax evasion and money laundering.
It included a clause stating the foreign secretary must, by Dec. 31, 2020, “prepare a draft order in council requiring the government of any British Overseas Territory that has not introduced a publicly accessible register of the beneficial ownership of companies within its jurisdiction to do so.”
It remains unclear how many of the 10 overseas territories have introduced such a register.
