Luxury property of former head of International Bank of Azerbaijan confiscated in London

The wife of banker Jahangir Hajiyev, arrested in Azerbaijan, has agreed to a confiscation decision of a Knights-bridge home worth about £14 million and a golf club in Ascot. This decision was adopted following an investigation by the National Crime Agency (NCA) into the acquisition of the property.

The NCA believes that the assets were obtained through large-scale fraud and theft, false accounting and money laundering, the agency said in a statement on August 5.

In 2018, the NCA seized Jahangir Hajiyev's properties in the UK to prevent them from being sold or transferred to anyone else.

As a reminder, Jahangir Hajiyev was chairman of the International Bank of Azerbaijan (IBA) until March 2015. The following year, he was convicted by a court in Azerbaijan of embezzlement, abuse of office, fraud and misappropriation. In 2019, he was also convicted of embezzlement from the Moscow branch of the IBA and is currently serving a 16-year prison sentence in Baku.

Note that NCA investigators subsequently uncovered multiple examples of funds from IBA being moved through various accounts and laundered by a close associate of Hajiyev. Significant sums were moved through the British Virgin Islands, St Kitts and Nevis, Panama, Cyprus and Luxembourg, and used to purchase property in London.

The purchase of a golf club, for example, was performed through a complex structure of companies registered in Luxembourg, as well as using offshore trusts in Cyprus.

Nearly all of the funds used to purchase the Knights-bridge house are believed to have come from two specific IBA accounts via Cyprus, Estonia and Switzerland, the NCA said.

It ought to be noted that the wife of IBA head Zamira Hajiyeva, who has lived in London for many years, made the news after it became known that between 2006 and 2016 she spent more than 16 million pounds ($21.3 million) at the Harrods shopping center in London.

When the trial began in February 2018, the value of all the real estate in her name was estimated at more than 22 million pounds ($29.2 million).