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, including invoices and contracts, purporting to support legitimate and substantial business transactions between three shell companies were “entirely fictitious and were produced in order to mask the underlying money-laundering activities of those orchestrating the accounts”.
A spokesman for the family said: “While the family is disappointed that any of the frozen funds have been forfeited, they are pleased to have succeeded in the majority of the claim and to have had the court confirm that neither ‘Javanshir Feyziyev or any of the Respondents have been engaged in corruption.’”
Feyziyev, who lives in a multimillion-pound Grade I-listed John Nash-designed mansion overlooking Regent’s Park in London, is chair of the UK-Azerbaijan all-parliamentary cooperation committee and co-chair of the EU parliament’s equivalent body.
Andy Lewis, head of civil recovery at the NCA, said: “This is a substantial forfeiture of money laundered through the Azerbaijan laundromat, and our success highlights the risk to anyone who uses these schemes.
“We were able to recover these millions without needing to prove the exact nature of the original criminal activity. We will continue to use civil powers to target money entering the UK via illegitimate means.”
Last year the NCA seized £4m from another London-based Azerbaijani couple in connection with the laundromat scheme. Suleyman Javadov and his wife Izzat Khanim Javadova, the well-known Ibiza DJ Mikaela Jav, agreed to hand over the money in July after admitting in a settlement that it came into the country illegally.
Javadov is the son of a former Azerbaijan deputy energy minister. Javadova is the daughter of oligarch Jalal Aliyev, an uncle of the country’s president Ilham Aliyev.
