OCCRP: Exposed one more corruption network connected Azerbaijani president’s clan
The Bribe Factory journalists have found that energy service company Unaoil, which has contacts with Azerbaijani authorities, also used offshore services provider Mossack Fonseca to establish offshore companies, according to the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP).
It is noted that one of the biggest “donors” to the United Kingdom’s ruling Tory party, property magnate JavadMarandi, was also a Mossack Fonseca client. According to the report, he was allegedly involved in Unaoil's dealings in Azerbaijan through his friend Mohammad Reza Raein, who acted as Unaoil's Azerbaijani middleman. Raein “was extremely close to Azerbaijan’s ruling Aliyev family,” according to a 1999 Kellogg Brown & Root file.
Azerbaijan’s Deputy Speaker of Parliament ValehAleskerov, who is also the head of the foreign investments’ department of the State Oil Company of Azerbaijan Republic (SOCAR), was one of Raein’s confidential sources, reported Fairfax Media. In 2005 and 2006, Raein asked the Ahsanis – Unaoil founders – to pay tens of thousands of dollars into the bank accounts of a man named "Javad." They identified the man as JavadMarandi after an email showed “Javad’s wife’s uncle Ilyas” as a senior executive of Azerbaijan's state-owned oil company, SOCAR.
According to the report, between 1996 and 2005, Raienwas paid at least US$ 4.5 million for his work in Azerbaijan.
Fairfax Media found that Unaoil's offshore companies had channeled corrupt payments to politicians, officials and oil industry executives in several countries for many years.
Meanwhile, according to Azerbaijani news agency Trend, British Petroleum (BP) Regional President on Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Turkey, Gordon Birrell, stated that BP, together with its partners on processing Azeri–Chirag–Gunashli and Shah Deniz natural gas fields, has invested over $58 billion in Azerbaijan during its more than 20-year history in that country.
Azerbaijani president IlhamAliyev’s clan is also mentioned in the documents of the Panama company Mossack Fonseca, which deals with offshore companies’ registration. It was reported that according to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), using a network of secretive companies in offshore tax havens, Aliyev's clan, advisers and allies set about acquiring expensive overseas homes and positions in the country’s valuable industries and natural resources, including the family’s majority control of a major gold mine that has been unknown until now.
It was reported that in the middle of 2003, a few months before the October presidential elections, Azerbaijan’s Tax Minister FazilMammadov started to create AtaHolding - one of today’s biggest conglomerates in the country. Mammadov invited president Aliyev’s family to join him and create a potentially powerful and profitable business-political partnership.
According to ICIJ reports, AtaHolding is a corporation with an impressive share in Azerbaijan’s banking, telecommunication, construction, mining, and oil sectors. As of 2014, its action assets exceeded $490 million.
The leaked documents show that two years later, in 2005, president Aliyev's wife, MP MehribanAliyeva, was named one of two managers of the UF Universe Foundation, along with FazilMammadov. In attachments to a “High Importance” email sent to Mossack Fonseca in February 2005 by a lawyer representing the Aliyevs' clan, documents proposed that then six-year-old Heydar Aliyev, the president’s son who is known in the files as “A1,” be made the beneficiary of 20 percent of the foundation’s proceeds. The plan also proposed that the president’s two daughters, Leyla, then 19, and Arzu, then 17, would hold 15 percent each. Mammadov’s son held 30 percent while Ashraf Kamilov, a former tax ministry official, and other former tax officials held smaller stakes. So, too, did AtaHolding’schairman, Ahmet Erentok.