McMafia laws yield multi-million pound assets
Zamira Hajiyev, the wife of jailed Azeri banker Jahangir Hajiyev, has agreed to forfeit a house worth £14 million in Knightsbridge and a golf club in Ascot.
This decision comes after a civil recovery investigation into the acquisition of the properties by the National Crime Agency (NCA).
According to the NCA, the assets were obtained as a “direct result of large-scale fraud and embezzlement, false accounting and money laundering”.
These activities were linked to the looting of the International Bank of Azerbaijan by Jahangir Hajiyev, who is currently serving a 16-year jail sentence for the offences in Baku.
The NCA has been investigating Zamira Hajiyeva for six years, during which time the agency used ‘unexplained wealth orders’ (UWOs), which require individuals to explain the lawful provenance of assets, as well as interim freezing orders to ensure that they could not be sold, transferred or dissipated.
The UWOs, often dubbed McMafia Laws after the crime series on UK TV, were the first ever granted in the UK.
According to the NCA, most of the funds originated from two specific International Bank of Azerbaijan accounts.
They arrived in the UK via accounts set up in Cyprus, Estonia and Switzerland in the names of companies with no recorded link to Mr Hajiyev.
A British Virgin Islands (BVI) company was used to acquire luxury assets for the family, which were then transferred into an offshore BVI trust.
The NCA filed a claim for civil recovery of the assets in the High Court last year and on 1 August this year, the order was granted.
However, while the court concluded that the properties had been purchased through criminal activity, it made no finding in relation to Zamira Hajiyeva’s knowledge of how they were paid for.
A spokesman for the NCA said that 70 per cent of the value of both properties will be forfeited, adding that the agency will “deploy all the powers available to identify, pursue and recover the proceeds of crime.”
Roger Isaacs, National Technical Director of NIFA, said: “UWO’s are controversial because they can be made against individuals who may not only have never been convicted of criminal activity but may not even have been accused of any wrongdoing. They also reverse the normal presumption in English law that individuals are innocent until proven guilty because they carry a presumption that assets were acquired using the proceeds of crime.
It is down to the individuals against whom a UWO is sought to prove that any assets were acquired from legitimate sources of wealth.
This often requires a detailed forensic accountancy analysis, to follow the flow of funds, often across many international borders.
This recent success by the NCA may encourage it to consider making more use of the draconian UWO legislation, which was introduced because of the UK’s unwelcome reputation as a haven for money laundering.”
Sources: FT
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