Azerbaijan ‘laundromat’ – court orders family to hand over £5.6m brought into UK
A multimillionaire Azerbaijani politician and his family have been ordered to hand over £5.6m of suspect funds brought into the UK via a complex money-laundering scheme nicknamed the “Azerbaijani laundromat”.
A judge on Monday ordered that Javanshir Feyziyev and his family forfeit £5.63m held in various bank accounts after ruling the funds “arise from criminal conduct” and “money laundering”.
The National Crime Agency (NCA) said Feyziyev, a serving member of the Azerbaijan parliament, brought millions of pounds of illicit wealth into the UK via the laundromat.
The money laundering scheme was revealed in 2017 when confidential banking records were leaked to the Danish newspaper Berlingske and shared with the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, the Guardian, and other media partners.
The data showed that the Azerbaijani leadership, accused of serial human rights abuses, systemic corruption and rigging elections, made more than 16,000 covert payments between 2012 and 2014 – worth on average about $3m a day.
The National Crime Agency (NCA), which is investigating the international money laundering ring, had applied to the court to seize £15.3m of suspect funds from the family.
Westminster magistrates’ court district judge John Zani ruled on Monday that Feyziyev, his wife Parvana Feyziyeva, their son Orkhan, and a nephew, Elman Javanshir, must hand over a total of £5.6m after finding “key elements of money laundering”.
The NCA said the judge agreed there was “overwhelming evidence” that documents the family supplied to support their claims that the funds were generated lawfully were “entirely fictitious and were produced in order to mask the underlying money-laundering activities of those orchestrating the accounts”.
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