Six years after the National Crime Agency (NCA) applied for the first-ever Unexplained Wealth Order, it has this month secured the forfeiture of two luxury properties – a house in Knightsbridge worth approximately £14 million and a golf club in Ascot worth over £10.5 million – owned by the wife of jailed Azerbaijani banker Jahangir Hajiyev.
The court order, dated 1 August 2024, was made by consent between the NCA and Zamira Hajiyeva, with the High Court concluding that the UK properties were purchased using the proceeds of crime. In reaching this deal, no findings have been made about whether Mrs Hajiyeva knew the funds were tainted.
This forfeiture is a major win for the NCA after a long-running investigation to trace the complex financial flows of €125 million embezzled from the state-owned International Bank of Azerbaijan while Mr Hajiyev was chairman. He was convicted in Azerbaijan in 2016 of misappropriation, abuse of office, fraud and embezzlement, and is currently serving a 16-year jail sentence in Baku.
The NCA has stated that it did not receive a reasonable explanation for the source of funds used to purchase the Knightsbridge house and Ascot golf club, with the agency tracing a “significant portion” of the funds to financial arrangements used to conceal the theft of funds from the International Bank of Azerbaijan. The NCA’s evidence to the court showed how complex corporate structures were used to funnel the dirty money into the UK, including offshore trusts in Guernsey, the British Virgin Islands and Cyprus.
This case has also revealed the role of major UK law firms and banks in property transactions at the heart of the NCA’s investigation, raising serious questions about how rigorously UK professionals in the regulated sector check the source of wealth and source of funds when dealing with politically exposed clients from kleptocratic regimes. Meanwhile, the evidence that Harrow School received hundreds of thousands in donations from offshore trusts linked to Hajiyev has highlighted the need for much stricter requirements on private schools to check where their money comes from.
After facing numerous delays during its bid to recover these funds, the NCA’s successful forfeiture of the value of 70% of these two properties – amounting to over £17 million – brings to a close the long-running litigation relating to these properties.
Dr Susan Hawley, Executive Director of Spotlight on Corruption, said:
“This is a significant win for the NCA – even if it has taken six years to get here. This is exactly the kind of action against UK property owned by individuals from highly corrupt environments suspected of money laundering or corruption that we would like to see rolled out on a far more ambitious scale. These funds shouldn’t simply be siphoned off to the UK Treasury, but invested in credible anti-corruption work and investigative journalism in Azerbaijan from where the money was stolen, with a portion reinvested back into the NCA to make more ambitious and frequent enforcement of this type possible.”
