On August 5, 2024, the United Kingdom’s National Crime Agency (NCA) announced the forfeiture of a luxurious London townhouse and a golf club belonging to Zamira Hajiyeva, the wife of Azerbaijani state banker Jahangir Hajiyev, who is serving a 16-year prison sentence in Baku for embezzling over three billion dollars.

While Hajiyev looted the bank he chaired, his wife enjoyed a lavish lifestyle in London, flying in a US$42 million private jet, stocking her cellar with the world’s most expensive wines, and spending US$21 million at Harrods over a decade. Zamira Hajiyeva made headlines in 2018 as the subject of the UK’s first-ever Unexplained Wealth Order (UWO), which required her to explain the source of her suspiciously large fortune or risk losing her properties.

The NCA first seized US$500,000 worth of jewelry from a London auction house in November 2018 and then confiscated a US$1.5 million Cartier ring in January 2019. Now, Hajiyeva has agreed to forfeit her US$17.8 million home in London’s Knightsbridge and a golf club in Ascot, Berkshire. Both properties were temporarily frozen by the NCA in 2018, with a full property freezing order applied in March 2021 and a civil recovery order granted by London’s High Court in June 2023.

The NCA believes both the house and the golf club were obtained through large-scale fraud, embezzlement, false accounting, and money laundering. UWOs empower UK law enforcement agencies to target suspected corrupt wealth. According to the NCA’s statement, while the High Court concluded that Hajiyeva’s properties were purchased as a result of criminal activity, it did not make any findings regarding her knowledge of how the properties were paid for. Hajiyeva was not a respondent to the UWO obtained in relation to the golf club.

Hajiyeva’s lawyers told the Guardian that “the settlement involved no finding of fact by the court about our client’s knowledge or state of mind, still less involvement, in relation to these properties”. They explained that Hajiyeva settled because the inability to obtain documents from her jailed husband that were “potentially crucial to the case” made it “impossible to defend [the proceedings]”. The lawyers also mentioned being denied access to Hajiyev in prison.

Jahangir Hajiyev served as chairman of the state-owned International Bank of Azerbaijan (IBA) from 2001 until 2015. Arrested in December 2015, he was convicted in 2016 of misappropriation, abuse of office, large-scale fraud, and embezzlement, receiving a 15-year prison sentence. In 2019, further charges of suspected embezzlement at IBA’s Moscow subsidiary led to an additional year and a half being added to his sentence. The court found that during his tenure as IBA’s chairman, Hajiyev extracted money from the bank through the purchase and sale of promissory notes with companies registered outside Azerbaijan, concluding 922 contracts with 69 companies in jurisdictions with weak anti-money laundering controls.

Despite denying the accusations, OCCRP reported extensively on the IBA, central to investigations of a money-laundering operation known as the Azerbaijani Laundromat. The NCA identified several instances of funds derived from the state bank being transferred through multiple accounts consistent with common money laundering practices. The purchase of the golf club involved a complex structure of companies registered in Luxembourg and Guernsey, using offshore trusts in Guernsey and later Cyprus. The funds for the Knightsbridge house came from two specific IBA accounts, with no reasonable explanation provided for the source of funds used for either property. A significant proportion could be traced directly to sums generated by promissory notes and loan agreements used to conceal the theft of IBA monies.

The NCA plans to sell the properties, giving 70 percent of the net sale proceeds to the UK government—minus the agency’s legal costs – and returning 30 percent to Hajiyeva.

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