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When Azerbaijani investigative reporter Khadija Ismayilova was jailed in Baku in December, 2014 on trumped-up charges, her colleagues believed the real reason for her incarceration was her reporting on rapacious business deals involving the clan of Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev. Today, those colleagues launch The Khadija Project, a series of hard-hitting stories continuing her work in defiance of her ongoing incarceration. Journalists and volunteers from the United States and Europe joined forces with teams in Turkey and the Caucasus to finish the stories Ismayilova has been prevented from writing, Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) says.

Khadija’s illegal detention, like that of nearly 100 other Azerbaijani prisoners of conscience, is proof of the lengths to which the Aliyev clan will go to protect the billions they have looted from Azerbaijan, said Drew Sullivan, editor of the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP). In the major investigation, OCCRP journalist Miranda Patrucic teamed up with Joachim Dyfvermark of Swedish Television and Ola Westerberg of the Swedish News Agency to show how Swedish-Finnish telecommunications giant TeliaSonera abetted a massive business deal that may have drained as much as US$ 1 billion from Azerbaijan’s treasury. The reporters discovered that it has vanished into a maze of dodgy offshore corporations closely linked to the Aliyev clan. The details are to be found in documents unearthed by reporters who spent three months examining hundreds of pages of business records, annual reports and internal documents on the deal, OCCRP says.

According to the article, Lars Hammar, a retired police officer and one of Sweden's most experienced financial crime investigators, told the reporters after reviewing their findings, “It smells of corruption and bribery. No one could have dreamed that figures like this would have been paid or transferred.” The case may represent the largest bribery in Swedish history, he believes.

Studying the documents, the reporters concluded that TeliaSonera, hoping to expand into the highly lucrative telecommunications market in oil-rich Azerbaijan, was coerced into agreeing to a series of actions that worked against TeliaSonera’s own interests but massively benefited corporations and individuals closely linked to the Aliyevs, the article reads.

TeliaSonera’s new CEO, Johan Dennelind, was hired to clean up its business practices after a bribery scandal with the daughter of the Uzbekistani President was found out. Dennelind told reporters for OCCRP that the Azerbaijani transactions raise a number of questions, including exactly who TeliaSonera’s local partner in Azerbaijan was. He said the company has given all materials to prosecutors to review. In Azerbaijan, “we have a situation where we do not know the identity of our partner,” Dennelind said. It was likely someone close to power and the company has tried for more than 18 months to determine who its local partners are but without success, Dennelind added. He noted that they could neither prove, nor rule out the possibility that TeliaSonera bribed Aliyev’s regime.