OCCRP: Azerbaijani authorities transferred up to € 1 billion through offshore accounts to Europe to suppress human rights in the country

A money-laundering trial set to begin in mid-April in Italy has shed light on a hidden offshore operation that may have contributed to a major human rights crackdown in Azerbaijan in 2013.The Azerbaijani investigative journalist Khadija Ismayilova writes about this on the website of the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP).

Investigators preparing for the upcoming Milan trial of Luca Volonte, an Italian member of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), say they have uncovered € 2.39 million in payments to Volonte through British and offshore companies.

Most of the funding came through the British company Hilux Services LLP and its account in an Estonian bank from Baktelekom MMC, a limited liability corporation in Azerbaijan. A reporter for OCCRP discovered that the Azerbaijani company is owned by a businessman with ties to that country’s first family.

In October 2016, a few months after the scandal over payments to Volonte broke, Hilux Service LP changed its name to SL012732 LP, with limited information available in public listings.

The payments, prosecutors allege, were made in exchange for Volonte’s efforts to mute the European body’s criticism of Azerbaijan’s human rights record.

При этом, помимо 2,39 млн. евро, непосредственно выплаченных Волонте в период с 2012 по 2014 год, в обвинительном заключении миланской прокуратуры подчеркивается, что на счет британской «Hilux Services LLP» в период с декабря 2013 года по декабрь 2014 года было переведено до 1 млрд. евро. Таким образом, возникают подозрения в том, что данная коррупционная схема может быть намного шире.

While prosecutors say they traced the € 2.39 million directly to Volonte between 2012 and 2014, the indictment also notes that as much as € 1 billion was funneled into the account of British Hilux Services LLP between December 2013 and December 2014, leading to suspicions that the corruption scheme could be much bigger than the Volonte case.

Volonte’s involvement with Azerbaijan stretches back to 2011, when Christoph Strasser, a deputy in the German Parliament tasked by PACE with compiling a report on political prisoners in Azerbaijan, was denied a visa to visit the country on three separate occasions. That same year, Volonte visited Azerbaijan at the invitation of his fellow parliamentarian Elkhan Suleymanov, who represented Azerbaijan at PACE”.

Since Strasser couldn’t come in person, he asked Azerbaijani human rights activist Anar Mammadli to help to compile a list of political prisoners and to verify details of their cases for what turned out to be a highly critical report on the situation for PACE.

But even as Mammadli and others worked on the prisoners’ report throughout 2012, investigators say Volonte was advising the Azerbaijani government on how to improve the country’s image and helping to rebut allegations of corruption that had been outlined in a stinging report issued by the European Stability Initiative (ESI) think tank in mid-2012.

Prosecutors say Volonte was also working to undermine the Strasser Report within PACE. On Jan. 23, 2013, the assembly voted against endorsing it. The vote was 125-79 with 20 abstentions.

Azerbaijan human rights activists claim the PACE vote served as a green light for their government to launch a severe crackdown on civil society.

Soon after the vote, the government arrested eight members of the NIDA Civic Union, an independent youth movement that was organizing protests against alleged corruption within the country’s armed forces. One of them, Ilkin Rustamzade, is still in prison.

Ilgar Mammadov, the chairman of the opposition Republican Alternative movement who had announced his candidacy for presidency in the 2013 elections, was also arrested and remains in custody. The European Court of Human Rights has called his arrest politically motivated.

Anar Mammadli, the activist who worked on the report, was arrested in December 2013 and released in March 2016. High-profile arrests of activists and journalists have continued, and activists say that the authorities now hold 145 political prisoners.

It is recalled that earlier, the “European Stability Initiative” published the second part of the report on Azerbaijan called “Caviar Diplomacy: European Swamp”, which describes blatant facts of corruption schemes organized by the Azerbaijani authorities with the involvement of high-ranking European politicians.

The study describes the relationship of the Azerbaijani authorities with the Italian parliamentarian Luca Volont, who received about 3 million euros from Azerbaijan for “his dirty lobbying services.” Pedro Agramuntu, who visited Azerbaijan in 2003, 2005, 2010 and 2013 as an election observer, constantly defended Baku, when it was a question of human rights violations in that country.

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Источник: occrp.org