Tracking the Billions Stolen in Azerbaijan: An OCCRP Interactive Tool

Tens of billions of dollars are stolen by corrupt government officials, despots and autocrats each year, and tracking what they do with it is hard.When it’s stolen with the assistance of the criminal services industry -- the sophisticated lawyers, registration agents, offshore experts and business intelligence specialists who are handsomely paid to help the criminal and the corrupt -- it gets exponentially harder.

For more than a decade, a small clique of people in Azerbaijan has been siphoning off billions in public funds through a dizzying array of paper transfers and maneuvers mostly routed through murky offshore entities.

Names that appear again and again in offshore records? Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev’s immediate family. Others include cronies and close associates. Reporters for OCCRP have spent months tracking complex maneuvers that unfolded over years and the intricate ways these maneuvers are connected.

The resulting criminal network, which we call “Azerbaijan Inc.”, is so convoluted and entails so many hidden linkages that we developed a unique interactive tool to help people understand and track what this Azerbaijani cabal has been up to.

This company-and-asset interactive brings together into one place all of the documents and evidence that reporters have amassed. The work builds on that of Khadija Ismayilova, an OCCRP partner and investigative reporter who has been jailed in Azerbaijan since December of 2014 on trumped-up charges.

It also reflects the work of the many global reporters working on the Khadija Project who expect to spend years tracking down additional assets. These journalists revisited Ismayilova’s stories and gathered all documents available. They searched databases provided by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, looked up company registries in offshore tax havens, and gathered incorporation documents.

They included known incorporation dates, addresses, ownership structures and company links and built an extensive database that traced the connections between all of these pieces before translating that into the interactive launched today.

It took months of research and collaboration.