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The Aliyev family, whose profits have significantly reduced after the drop of oil prices, started to cultivate cotton in appropriated extensive lands, the website of the Azerbaijani newspaper Azadliq informs noting that between 1993 and 2010, the Aliyev family transferred “48 billion dollars stolen from Azerbaijan to offshore zones.” http://www.azadliq.info/135751.html

“In one of his latest speeches, Ilham Aliyev stated that cotton prices have increased. If it could be bought by 36 gapiks before, the prices have reached up to 50 gapiks this year. After the drop of oil prices, the Aliyevs started to cultivate cotton. Currently, the presidential family owns thousands hectares of lands sown with cotton,” the newspaper informs.

Azerbaijani president Ilham Aliyev’s clan is 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 Fazil Mammadov 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 Mehriban Aliyeva, was named one of two managers of the UF Universe Foundation, along with Fazil Mammadov. 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 Ata Holding’s chairman, Ahmet Erentok.