The announcement that the wife of an Azerbaijani banker is the first target of British efforts to crack down on foreigners' illicit wealth was welcomed by good government advocates, but raised concerns that London may only be aiming at figures who are out of favor with their home governments.
On October 10, British media reported that the target of Britain's first "unexplained wealth order" is Zamira Hajiyeva, the wife of Jahangir Hajiyev, the former head of the International Bank of Azerbaijan. The order is a recently introduced instrument allowing British law enforcement officers to demand explanations when a person's wealth does not correspond to their declared income. It is aimed at cracking down on the vast amounts of ill-gotten wealth - much of it from the former Soviet Union - parked in London.
There is no shortage of dodgy Azerbaijani money in the UK. The investigation into the "Azerbaijani Laundromat," for example, found that shell companies based in the UK played a key role in the Azerbaijani political elites' money-laundering and influence-buying operations.
The Hajiyevs, meanwhile, had already been cast out of the Baku political elite: In 2015, Hajiyev was sentenced by an Azerbaijani court to 15 years in prison for misuse of funds.
The government-friendly Azerbaijani press - not typically a fan of stories about Azerbaijanis falling afoul of investigators in the West - widely reported the news about Hajiyeva. "All of England is talking about Zamira Hajiyeva," crowed a headline on Haqqin.az, a news site connected to Azerbaijan's security forces.
Two days before the news broke in the UK, in fact, Haqqin had already reported that Hajiyeva was the target of the order. The story cited the Telegram channel Banksta - a Russian-language channel covering banking affairs - but a sister website of Haqqin, Azeri Daily, had named Hajiyev as early as July.
That Hajiyeva was targeted, out of the many potential subjects of the order, raised some consternation among observers.
"There is an interesting issue with the case of Zamira Hajiyeva," tweeted Anar Mammadli, an Azerbaijani human rights activist. "After all, she and her husband, Jahangir Hajiyev, are not the first Azerbaijani civil servants to buy property in London. Will the other official-families' 'contributions' to the British economy be investigated? After all, they are not alone!"
"What a can of worms," tweeted John Heathershaw, a professor at the University of Exeter who studies post-Soviet financial ties with the West. "Many thousands more potential cases. Or are we just going to look at those who have fallen out of favour with their home governments?"
"Hajiyev and his wife have already fallen foul of the system in Azerbaijan. I don't imagine the Azerbaijani regime will be overly concerned to see this investigation. Who knows, maybe they even had a hand in triggering the investigation," tweeted analyst Alex Nice.
"My take on the UWO is that it looks like a missed chance to send a big message," tweeted Oliver Bullough, a journalist who has extensively covered post-Soviet wealth in the UK. "Jahangir Hajiyev had already been jailed in Azerbaijan so why not use the standard asset recovery route, as with Gulnara Karimova? UWOs are supposed to be for assets that can't be seized otherwise."
Nevertheless, the move was welcomed by good government advocates. "UWOs should now be used more widely to pursue more of the £4.4 billion worth of suspicious wealth we have identified across the UK," Duncan Hames, director of policy at Transparency International UK, told the BBC.
And some in the region wondered if their oligarchs would be next. "It seems that investigators from the National Crime Agency started from the letter 'A,'" joked Uzbekistani writer Hamid Ismailov on twitter. "Uzbek 'nouveau riches' might think that they are last in the running order:) in between Uganda and Zambia."
Joshua Kucera is the Turkey/Caucasus editor at Eurasianet, and author of The Bug Pit.
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