“Clothes treated with a dangerous chemical could get into the city's retail network”

The protracted trial on the claim of entrepreneur Anar Garibov against the owners of the “Azur” shopping center Fuad Rzayev and Babek Babayev, which has been repeatedly written about in the media, is acquiring a criminal-detective character. The more evidence the courts demand, the more surprising facts come to the surface in the course of their search.

- It is good that the courts have appointed a re-examination of the case. As a result, the possibility of getting into the city's retail network of branded clothing, abundantly treated – imagine – with DDT and its metabolites, is prevented," the plaintiff claims. - We can say that we managed to avoid mass infection, which could lead to unpredictable consequences, up to a fatal outcome.

DDT is a chemical drug designed to kill insects, but it is also dangerous for humans. “In small and medium doses, it causes poisoning,.. in large doses, it can cause death,” the Internet warns. But what does DDT have to do with a case about a dispute between people engaged in a business completely far from chemistry?

Before answering our question, let us take a short digression into the history of the scandalous court case, the details of which are reflected in a number of previous materials on the same topic.

Five years ago, entrepreneur Anar Garibov rented a large area in “Azur,” made expensive repairs, brought new equipment and a wide range of branded clothing items. I invested about a million manats in the opening of the store as a whole. But less than two months later, the owners of the shopping center, violating the terms of the contract, announced a multiple increase in rent.

The conflict could not be settled by peace. Landlords began to resort to various methods to force the entrepreneur to agree to their terms or leave the mall. And the latter did not agree – after all, he spent a lot of money on the store. Most of them were debts and bank loans that had to be repaid. So the lawsuits began.

In order to take the renovated premises from the tenant, the owners of the shopping center then turned off the lights in the store for a long time, then flooded it and the clothes displayed in the salon with sewage water. Then the builders were allowed into the premises, who, in front of the bewildered sellers and buyers, arbitrarily began to reshape everything. Finally, one day, when the store's employees came to work in the morning, they found neither clothes nor equipment here – everything was looted, broken, taken out.

After months of searching, Anar Garibov managed to find part of the goods in the basement of the Grand Yeni Hyatt complex, located seven kilometers from the shopping center where the store was located. This complex also belonged to one of the owners of the shopping center - Babek Babayev.

- However, this pile of rotten, emitting an unbearable smell of rags, on which worms crawled, could no longer be called clothes, - the tenant says bitterly. – Since then, I have been seeking at least compensation for the damage caused. I will not open a discussion about the fairness and effectiveness of our judicial system. I will say only one thing. Each of my appeals to law enforcement agencies does not cool down the ardor, but on the contrary, pushes the owners of the shopping center to new violations that the court and other instances do not dare to call by their name. Finally, my perseverance gave the first result: the judge of the Baku Court of Appeal, Vusala Bakhyshova, demanded an expert opinion indicating both the market value and the shelf life of each unit from the thousands of damaged goods list.

To be honest, I thought that the appearance of the remnants of the clothes I found in the basement would immediately scare off experts. After all, it has already been put into disrepair. But what I saw there surprised me myself – the product was almost in its original form prepared for examination. In addition, it turned out that, in some mysterious way, hundreds of photographs and video images of moldy clothes with a horde of insects, submitted by us to the court as evidence, disappeared from the case materials.

I do not believe in otherworldly forces. But he refused to believe his eyes either. Whatever it was, the experts began to inspect the goods. Soon everyone around began to itch a lot. The participants of the examination suspected something was wrong. And the conclusion of the conducted biochemical analysis turned out to be absolutely stunning.

To hide the traces of their tricks, the owners of “Azur” dried and cleaned the remnants of their clothes, and found no better way than to treat them with DDT and its metabolites. Representatives of the older generation probably remember how dust DDT used to be used to fight various kinds of insects, but because of its increased carcinogenicity in the early 80s it was banned all over the world.

We do not know how the son of an official (Fuad, one of the owners of “Azur” is the son of Baba Rzayev, the president of “Azerenergy”) and his partner, the owner of a large construction company, acquired a dangerous drug. But what were they thinking about when, pretending to be ready to return the DDT-treated clothes to the owner, they allowed the possibility of such goods hitting the shelves again? After all, they could not fail to understand how dangerous this chemical is for the life of everyone who wears such a jacket or shirt! In addition, as Garibov says, out of more than 20 thousand units of processed garments, a considerable part is children's.

The answer to these questions from the representatives of the owners of the shopping center will probably be required in court. And according to the independent lawyer Akram Hasanov, who commented on them for us, if the mentioned goods really somehow returned to the shelves and subsequently caused negative consequences, then such an action would be legitimately qualified as intentional infliction of serious harm to people's health. In addition, there is damage or damage to the entrepreneur's property, falsification of evidence, the lawyer believes, and all these facts require a thorough investigation.

We found out the attitude of the chairman of the Consumer Union of the country Eyub Huseynov to this story.

"Each product has specific storage conditions," he said. - It is clear from the submitted documents and the video that the clothes were stored in improper conditions. As for the treatment of clothing with a carcinogenic drug, this, of course, is unacceptable, and is criminal in nature. Experts who have checked this product for suitability have put their health at risk and are now in the high-risk group. Everyone who has been in contact with the treated clothing should be under special medical supervision. The premises with DDT-treated goods must be sealed by law enforcement agencies, and the goods themselves must be disposed of by a specialized institution in a protected place.

Garibov himself expresses the opinion that here the owners of the shopping center pursued a different goal:

- Buyers who bought such clothes at the first signs of harm to health would call the seller to account, - he argues. - And this is exactly what the owners of Azur are so diligently trying to achieve – to teach me a lesson, as a tenant who has suffered because of their lawlessness, who has not stopped fighting for the restoration of his rights for five years, despite all the difficulties being repaired. In general, there should be no difficulties in our case – all the facts are obvious. The only obstacle is that the father of one of the defendants is the head of a large and influential state organization “Azerenergy". I have every reason for such a statement. For example, the name of a certain Rza Mammadov, the deputy head of the Human Resources Department of “Azerenergy,” initially appears in the case. Moreover, if earlier he occasionally appeared at the most acute disagreements between the parties, then during the latest research conducted by experts he was constantly present here, hindering specialists from working. Receiving a considerable salary from the state for his main position, Rza Mammadov managed to protect the interests of the son of the head of this company, Fuad Rzayev, who committed new illegal actions during working hours. Such activity of a “human rights defender on a voluntary basis,” who is at the same time an official of Azerenergy, I think, should attract the attention of the relevant authorities. By the way, Rza Mammadov previously worked in a responsible position in the prosecutor's office, which in turn could not or did not want to see egregious offenses in this case. It became known to me that by the end of the examination process, Rza Mammadov had left his job at “Azerenergy,” and the next day after his dismissal he received a notarized power of attorney to protect the interests of Fuad Rzayev.

That is what complicated turns a seemingly simple dispute about the amount of rent and the term of the contract takes, when law enforcement agencies begin to assess the facts of violations of the law based on who is behind them.

Photo: result of chemical examination of a “Massimo Dutti” men's jacket treated with DDT and its metabolites

In the photo: the result of a chemical examination of a ZARA women's shirt, which can cause severe disorders in the respiratory system

Previous articles about this trial:

• The trial on the suit of a businessman claiming more than a million bankruptcy through the fault of the “Azure” shopping center
• Baku Court of Appeal forbade the press to observe process of  "FB-Company" lawsuit against "Azur Shopping Center"Social 
• The trial on the suit of a businessman claiming more than a million bankruptcy through the fault of the “Azure” shopping center
• Who is behind the contradictory statements of the Court of Appeal?

• The court, the police, the prosecutor's office – whose themis will prevail