By Harut Sassounian
The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) selected Pres. Ilham Aliyev in 2012 for its first “Person of the Year Award [which] recognizes the individual or institution that has done the most to advance organized criminal activity and corruption in the world.”
OCCRP is a worldwide network of investigative journalists that has been exposing for over a decade the appropriation of state funds by Pres. Aliyev’s family and close associates to purchase real estate overseas.
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While there are numerous groups that report about Azerbaijan’s jailing of journalists, opposition members and human rights activists, OCCRP is one of the rare groups that has documented the secret acquisitions of valuable real estate in the heart of London by the Aliyev clan. Many of these holdings are hidden behind foreign offshore trusts, making the true owners of the properties difficult to identify.
However, in 2022, the British government adopted new laws that help reveal the owners of some of these properties. In an article titled, “Luxury London Properties Linked to Family of Azerbaijan’s President Are Hidden Behind an Offshore Trust,” OCCRP’s James O’Brien reported this month that the Aliyev family “acquired U.K. real estate worth hundreds of millions of dollars.” The article stated: “newly available data reveals that Aliyev’s daughters own six luxury apartments in London. But the current ownership of 10 [other] properties, acquired by the family for $160 million, remains unknown because they were moved into an offshore trust. Trust structures are currently exempt from public scrutiny.”
OCCRP reported that the Aliyevs own in London “A hotel building near the British Museum. Penthouse apartments just steps away from Hyde Park. A mansion overlooking the green expanse of Hampstead Heath. And much more. In 2021, OCCRP revealed that a nearly $700-million collection of London real estate had been acquired by the family and close associates of Ilham Aliyev, the longtime authoritarian president of Azerbaijan. Having leveraged two decades of unchallenged political power into vast wealth, this elite group had chosen to spend a fortune in one of the financial centers of the democratic world. The properties they purchased were owned by dozens of secretive offshore companies, hiding their ownership from public scrutiny. It was only thanks to the Pandora Papers, a leak of secret offshore documents obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, that reporters were able to link them to the Aliyevs.”
The OCCRP reported that it “teamed up with researchers from Transparency International UK, an anti-corruption advocacy group, to reexamine the 23 London properties our earlier investigation had linked to the Aliyevs.” They found out that “President Aliyev’s daughters, Leyla and Arzu Aliyeva, personally own six luxury apartments just across the street from Hyde Park. But the Register [of Overseas Entities] fails to establish who ultimately owns 10 properties the Aliyevs and their associates had acquired for $160 million: the Hampstead Heath mansion, two townhouses, multiple flats [apartments] and penthouses, and a six-story building in Central London. It only reveals that they are owned by a trust registered in the Isle of Man.”
Aliyev’s office “did not respond to [OCCRP’s] requests for comment, but President Aliyev has previously attributed his wealth to success in business.”
OCCRP reported that on his presidential website in 2021, Pres. Aliyev “acknowledged that he was ‘not a poor man’ when he became president, but said this was due to his business achievements. (The son of Azerbaijan’s first post-independence leader, Aliyev served as a vice-president of Azerbaijan’s state oil company before succeeding his father as president in 2003). ‘Unlike some other people in the West who dedicate all their fortune to their cats and dogs, in Italy and Azerbaijan we value family values,’ he said at the time. ‘Therefore, I transferred all my business to my children.’”
In 2015, OCCRP reported that “Leyla Aliyeva, the Azerbaijani president’s then 29-year-old elder daughter, was one of the directors of the British company that managed the [five-story luxury] building, worth over $33 million.”
Although the trust hides the ownership of 10 high-end London properties, for nine of them, “the Register of Overseas Entities lists the same person as having ‘significant influence or control’ over the offshore companies that own them: Mir Pashayev…a cousin of President Ilham Aliyev’s wife. The 54-year-old-banker is closely linked to the Aliyev family’s business interests. He is a board chairman of Pasha Bank, a major lender owned by the president’s daughters Leyla and Arzu, and deputy chairman of the board of directors of their entire Pasha Holding business conglomerate, which spans interests in banking, insurance, and construction.” OCCRP reported that “in October 2014, he [Pashayev] took over from Leyla Aliyeva the directorship of the company that manages her mansion on Speakers’ Corner [in London].”
Pres. Aliyev’s constant threats to attack Armenia, if Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan does not agree to make concessions, are meant to distract attention away from Aliyev’s violations of human rights and embezzlement of Azerbaijan’s state funds which deprives his citizens of massive amounts of income from the country’s billions of dollars in oil and gas revenues.
