Court documents
- National Crime Agency v Zamira Hajiyeva [2018] EWHC 2534 (Admin) (High Court judgment on Hajieyva’s application to discharge the unexplained wealth order)
- Zamira Hajieyva v National Crime Agency [2020] EWCA Civ 108 (Court of Appeal judgment on Hajieyva’s appeal of the High Court’s decision)
- Consent Order handed down by Mr Justice Cavanagh in August 2024 (court order approving Hajiyeva’s settlement)
Introduction
In 2018, Zamira Hajiyeva became the first person in the UK to be subject to an Unexplained Wealth Order (“UWO”), a tool which was heralded as a turning point in law enforcement’s ability to investigate and seize assets suspected to be linked to illicit wealth.
Hajyeva came to the UK in 2006 on a Tier 1 Investor Visa, known as a ‘Golden Visa’, having invested £1 million in UK government bonds with a loan from her husband, Jahangir Hajiyev. Hajiyev, who was the chairman of the International Bank of Azerbaijan (“IBA”) between 2001- 2015, was sentenced to a 15 years’ imprisonment by the Azerbaijani authorities for defrauding the bank of £2.2bn and ordered to pay the bank US $39m.
Hajiyeva lived in a glamorous Knightsbridge townhouse, just a stone’s throw away from Harrods – where court documents reveal she spent £16m between 2006 and 2016. This included over £300,000 in a sandwich shop, £1.9m on Cartier and £3.5m on Boucheron jewellery. Notably, she spent £2,000 on cold meats on a single day in 2014. To pay for these goods, she used over 54 credit cards, over 30 of which were issued by the bank for which her husband was chairman.
Hajiyeva’s conspicuous spending was to be her downfall. On 27 February 2018, the UK’s National Crime Agency (“NCA”) obtained two UWOs concerning her residence of 12-14 Walton Street and another property they suspected she owned, the Mill Ride Golf and Country Club in Ascot, Berkshire. These properties were worth £11.5m and £10.5m respectively.
However by 2024, after a protracted legal battle, the NCA abandoned their efforts to recover the full value of Hajieya’s assets through civil recovery proceedings, with the parties instead reaching a court-approved settlement whereby she would retain 30% of the value of the properties. With Hajiyeva set to walk away with millions of pounds following the settlement, this case is a cautionary tale of how asset recovery proceedings can fall dramatically short of initial expectations.
Why does this case matter?
- This case marked the first use of a UWO: a civil investigatory tool brought in by the Criminal Finances Act 2017 to enable law enforcement to get to the bottom of suspect wealth linked to foreign political elites. While it was thought that UWOs would become a go-to tool for law enforcement – particularly for investigating individuals from kleptocratic regimes where it is difficult to evidence the trail of illicit wealth – the early use of UWOs has been lacklustre, with only a handful of cases in the first few years after their introduction. However, the tide has begun to change in 2024/2025 with an uptick in the use of UWOs thanks in large part to new cost protection for law enforcement.
- Hajiyeva agreed to forfeit the two properties under investigation in a settlement with the NCA. The court order recording the settlement concluded that the properties were purchased using the proceeds of crime, however she was still allowed to keep 30% of the proceeds of their sale and no adverse findings were made about whether she knew the funds were tainted. This marks the start of a trend of settlements increasingly being used by the NCA in illicit wealth cases which has precluded further scrutiny of the professional enablers who may have protected illicit wealth in these cases.
- The investigation revealed a cast of businesses, professional service providers and those in the non-regulated sector who facilitated or benefitted from Hajiyeva’s spending sprees. Court documents reveal Harrow School received hundreds of thousands in donations from offshore trusts linked to Hajiyev. This raises serious questions about how entities which are not subject to anti-money laundering regulations should be held accountable for enabling or legitimising dirty money flows and whether stricter requirements should be imposed on them to check the source of funds and source of wealth when engaging in high-risk activity.
Global context
The NCA’s investigation further revealed the IBA’s central role at the heart of the Azerbaijani laundromat and where the looted money ended up.
On 4 September 2017, the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) published two reports: “What is a Laundromat?” and “The Origin of the Money”. These reports were based on leaked bank documents from Den Danske Bank in Estonia revealing an elaborate money laundering scheme in which roughly US$2.9 billion was channelled out of Azerbaijan between 2012 and 2014 under the guise of apparently lawful transactions. These funds were deposited into bank accounts based in Estonia and Latvia, and almost immediately transferred on to various companies and individuals associated with Azerbaijan’s ruling elite.
The IBA was a key player in this, with money from the bank being moved under the guise of lawful investment loans to companies in various foreign jurisdictions.
Encounters with the law
Following the UWOs being granted against her, the onus was on Hajiyeva to explain the origin of her husband’s wealth, having declared that she had no income of her own. How could a salaried state official – who court records showed had a net income of $70,650 and share dividends of $90,000 in 2008 – afford these luxury assets? A failure to give an adequate response would lead to a legal presumption that her assets were recoverable by the NCA as illicit wealth.
In October 2018, Hajiyeva was arrested in the UK in connection with an extradition request by Azerbaijan and later granted bail. Along with her husband, she was accused of using credit cards to steal nearly £100 million from the IBA. On one occasion she allegedly withdrew £861,000 in cash. In 2016, she was arrested in absentia in Azerbaijan and declared “wanted”. However, on 29 September 2019, a UK court refused the extradition request, concluding that she would not receive a fair trial due to a lack of an independent judiciary, the punishment of lawyers for taking on certain cases, and the high-profile and sensitive nature of her case.
The UK’s first UWO challenge
In July 2018, Hajiyeva applied to overturn the UWO concerning her residential property – which consisted of two Grade II listed properties converted as one – in London’s swankiest postcode. She had initially tried to keep her identity secret through an anonymity order. The judge refused, ruling that there was a clear public interest in full reporting, including her and her husband’s identity.
The court heard that No. 12 was bought for £11.5m in 2009 by a BVI-incorporated company called Vicksburg Global Inc. with a £7.5m mortgage in favour of Barclays Suisse. In 2015, Hajiyeva told the Home Office in her application for indefinite leave to remain that she was the beneficial owner of Vicksburg. In 2018, however, the BVI Financial Investigation Agency told the NCA that the beneficial owner was her husband.
Hajiyeva advanced 8 grounds in her bid to overturn the NCA’s UWO, including that (i) she was not a “politically exposed person” because the IBA was not a “state-owned enterprise”; and (ii) they had mischaracterised the provenance and probity of her husband’s income.
All grounds were refused by the judge. Supperstone J held that Azerbaijan had held a majority shareholding at all material times (between 50.2% and 60.6% between 2008 and 2013). On Hajiyev’s income, the court received a 2011 report prepared by Werner Capital that said his net worth was $72.5m. It also saw letters from the IBA that said his salary between 2001 and 2008 went from US $30,000 to US $70,000. As a state employee, the judge concluded that “…it is very unlikely that such a position would have generated sufficient income to fund the acquisition of [No. 12]”.
Hajiyeva appealed to the Court of Appeal who upheld the High Court’s decision in 2020 and reinforced the reasons given. The judges noted that the Werner Capital report “posed more questions… than it answered”, including the acquisition of US $20m when Hajiyev was a student. The Supreme Court later refused to hear the matter, saying it raised no arguable point of law.
Litigation fatigue
In 2020, the NCA sought to permanently recover Hajiyeva’s collection of luxury jewellery, which was thought to be worth at least £3m, in separate proceedings. However, these civil asset forfeiture proceedings became subsumed by legal arguments from Hajiyeva’s lawyers, who claimed that Hajiyev – who was an interested party in the litigation – could not properly be served legal papers or participate from his location in Azerbaijani prison.
Following protracted battles through the courts to uphold the UWO and seize the jewellery, in 2024 the NCA announced that it had reached a court settlement with Hajiyeva. As part of the settlement, the NCA discontinued their attempts to recover Hajiyeva’s treasure trove of jewels. However, the settlement was presented as a success on the basis that it obtained the forfeiture of both properties and recognised that they were purchased with the proceeds of crime.
Assets yet to be realised
Whilst the Mill Ride Golf club sold for the expected price of £4.25m, Hajiyeva’s residential property reportedly struggled to sell, having had £1.25m cut from its asking price.
This case reminds us that whilst there are benefits to the use of settlements due to difficult evidentiary thresholds and the mounting expenses of asset recovery, they are not clear-cut wins as the deal cut off the opportunity for meaningful public scrutiny of the underlying evidence and allowed wealthy individuals to walk away with the proceeds of corruption.
However, the recent introduction of costs protection for law enforcement agencies in all civil recovery proceedings should strengthen ambition to persist with high-stakes litigation to ensure that successful UWOs ultimately lead to permanent recovery of illicit wealth.
