Azerbaijan - Global Laundromat

[MosJan]

http://haydzayn.am/p/66201

 

Ադրբեջանական լոբբիի «հերոսների» դիմաց ցմահ փակ է ԵԽԽՎ-ն. Նաիրա Կարապետյան

Վերջապես այս օրը եկավ, երբ մի շարք պատգամավորների (արդեն նախկին)՝ ադրբեջանական լոբբիի «հերոսների» դիմաց ցմահ փակ է Եվրոպայի խորհուրդը և ԵԽԽՎ-ն. ֆեյսբուքյան իր էջում գրում է ԱԺ նախկին պատգամավոր, ԵԽԽՎ հայաստանյան պատվիրակության անդամ Նաիրա Կարապետյանը։

Կարապետյանը տեղեկացնում է, որ ԵԽԽՎ զեկույցում նշվում է, որ պատգամավորներին կաշառելու գործընթացները կազմակերպել են ադրբեջանցի պատգամավորներ Մուսլիմ Մամեդովը և Էլխան Սուլեյմանովը: Նրանք նույնպես ցմահ զրկվել են ԵԽԽՎ մուտք գործելու իրավունքից։

«Ագուստին Կոնդե, Ալան Դեստեքս, Կարին Շտրենց, Գորան Լինդբլադ, Տադեուշ Իվինսկի և այլն. կարդում եմ անունները և ժպտում՝ սա մեր պատվիրակության (տարբեր տարիների) աշխատանքային այսպես կոչված «սև ցուցակի» պատվավոր անդամներն են, մարդիկ, ովքեր անթաքույց պաշտպանել են Ադրբեջանի ցանկացած հոդաբաշխ և անհոդաբաշխ զառանցանք։ Իլհամին թվում էր, թե սեփական երկրի կեղտը կհաստատվի նաև Եվրոպայի խորհրդում, բայց տեսաք, հարգարժաններ, ժողովուրդը չի սխալվում՝ ստի ոտքը կարճ է»։

Նախկին պատգամավորը հիշեցնում է. «Կար ժամանակ, երբ Հեյդարի որդու թեթև ձեռքով և նրա հավատարիմ վկաների ջանքերով, Լուկա Վոլոնտեի միայն անունը ելույթում հիշատկելու համար կարելի էր զրկվել ձայնի իրավունքից և հրապարակային պարսավանքի ենթարկվել, իսկ հիմա նա այլևս պերսոնա-նոն-գրատա է Եվրոպայի խորհրդում։Իհարկե, դեռ կան ծպտյալներ, բայց սա հրապարակային դաս է բոլորի համար»։

Շնորհավորելով ու շնորհակալություն հայտնելով այս կարևոր աշխատանքում իրենց՝ անգամ փոքր լուման ունեցողներին, Նաիրա Կարապետյանն արձանագրում է. «Ադրբեջանի անվերջ դիմակների հավաքածուի գլխավորներից ևս մեկը պատռվեց»:

[Yervant1]

Human Rights Watch

Feb 7 2019

German Parliament Takes Azerbaijan Corruption Seriously – Finally

Bundestag Disciplines Karin Strenz MP for Hiding Money From Baku

Hugh Williamson

Director, Europe and Central Asia Division

Better late than never. The German parliament has finally disciplined an MP from chancellor Merkel’s Christian Democratic party (CDU) over the MP’s role in a US$2.9 billion influence buying corruption scandal between Azerbaijan and more than a dozen European politicians.

Karin Strenz, a German MP since 2009, had a reputation for defending Azerbaijan despite its terrible human rights record In 2017 it became clear why: She was among a number of members of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE)who were found to have received money and gifts from Azerbaijan authorities between 2012 to 2014. During this period, PACE voted down a key resolution on politically motivated imprisonment in Azerbaijan.

Strenz was kicked out of the CDU’s delegation to PACE in early 2018, a few months after the “Azerbaijan Laundromat” scandal broke.

On January 18, the leadership of the Bundestag finally moved on the issue, ruling that Strenz had broken parliamentary rules on declaring external income.

Strenz accepted the ruling but made light of it: “When you commit a parking offence you get a parking ticket” she said.

She could face a fine of up to €60,000 (US$68,000) and several MPs, also from the Social Democrats, the CDU’s coalition allies, have called for her to be stripped of her parliamentary mandate.

“Whitewashing (the Baku) government, manipulating election monitoring, lying and getting rich at the same time is not the same as a parking offence,” Frank Schwabe, an SPD MP tweeted about Strenz.

The Bundestag may have been slow to act against Strenz, but it has been faster than any other national parliament. She is the first MP to face political consequences at home for taking money from Azerbaijan.

This is the most shocking aspect. PACE has banned 16 former members from the parliament’s headquarters in Strasbourg, but little else has happened, despite the clear evidence of the politicians’ actions, that undermined the Council of Europe’s standing as Europe’s leading human rights body.

Let’s hope politicians in Spain, Belgium, and other parliaments hit by the scandal will quickly follow the Bundestag’s lead. It’s about standing up for human rights in Azerbaijan, and in Europe as a whole.

https://www.hrw.org/news/2019/01/29/german-parliament-takes-azerbaijan-corruption-seriously-finally?fbclid=IwAR2cBSN94MDBO_aFNL_BYDzZseo2-FGwcsMX0DGZ3DjPgl-BojrjQI73wu4

[Yervant1]

Any country or politician that azerboobjan can't buy automatically becomes scammers and are engaged in fraud against them.

I could have posted this easily in the Comedistan thread!

 

Trend.az

New Azerbaijan Party member: Some Western organizations engaged in political trade

8 February 2019 11:56 (UTC+04:00)

Baku, Azerbaijan, Feb. 8

By Elchin Mehdiyev – Trend:

Freedom House organization’s report is ridiculous and meaningless, member of the political council of the New Azerbaijan Party, editor-in-chief of Azerbaijan’s Iki Sahil newspaper Vugar Rahimzade told Trend on Feb. 8.

“Therefore, the reports of such organizations must not be taken seriously,” he said. “All documents prepared by such organizations are biased.”

“Some Western organizations are engaged in political trade,” Rahimzade said. “They are “professional” scammers and are engaged in fraud. Such non-governmental organizations, under the guise of protecting human rights and freedoms, pursue other goals, in particular, put pressure on different countries and dictate their conditions.”

“Freedom House’s report is regrettable,” he said. “To state that Azerbaijan and Turkey are lagging behind, but Armenia is developing, is absurd. Freedom House considers the countries proceeding from their political preferences.”

“Armenia is a criminal, terrorist country,” Rahimzade added. “The Armenians committed terrorist attacks not only in Azerbaijan, but also in Georgia, Turkey, the US and Europe. Everyone knows the assassinations and killings committed by ASALA terrorist organization. To mention such a country as a model for developed countries is a very ridiculous and meaningless approach.”

https://en.trend.az/azerbaijan/politics/3016555.html?fbclid=IwAR1y6NjapBCyvOFoxhCxb2wgPSsCHEjR2zewwTfEAcjyJdURxjjM9uDcv3A

 

[Yervant1]

Rabbi Schneier Takes Evangelical Pastors

On Propaganda Tour of Azerbaijan

By Harut Sassounian

Publisher, The California Courier

www.TheCaliforniaCourier.com

For several years, the government of Azerbaijan and its diplomats
overseas have gone to great lengths to win over Jews worldwide,
American Jewish organizations, and Israel.

Azerbaijan is simply copying Turkey’s sinister behavior that until
recently wooed Jewish organizations in the United States and Israel’s
government to block the passage of a congressional resolution
recognizing the Armenian Genocide. Many Jewish groups ended their
immoral cooperation with Turkey, after Turkish President Rejep Tayyip
Erdogan began making anti-Semitic statements and threatening Israel.

Just like Turkey, Azerbaijan’s outreach to Jewish organizations and
Israel is based on the typical anti-Semitic belief that Jews control
American politicians and it is therefore in Azerbaijan’s interest to
be on the good side of ‘powerful’ Jews. According to the Israeli
newspaper Haaretz, “many countries nurture their relationship to
Israel in hopes of finding favor with influential American Jewish
organizations who will in turn speak well of them to the U.S.
government.”

Furthermore, Azerbaijan’s pro-Jewish efforts are based on the fact
that it purchases billions of dollars of modern weapons from Israel.
In return, Azerbaijan sells a large amount of oil to Israel. There
have been also intelligence reports that Azerbaijan has provided
Israel with several bases on its border with Iran, should Israel
decide to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities.

The latest example of the collaboration between American Jewish
leaders and Azerbaijan is the visit to Baku on March 3-8 by a group of
U.S. evangelical pastors led by New York-based Orthodox Rabbi Marc
Schneier “to promote interfaith dialogue and highlight cooperation
with Israel,” according to the Associated Press. This was the first
ever evangelical delegation to visit the Muslim Shiite nation. The
Rabbi described Azerbaijan as “the most beloved and respected Muslim
country in the eyes of the Jewish American community,” reported Trend,
an Azeri news agency. Schneier spoke at an event in the U.S. Congress
last year celebrating the close friendship between Azerbaijan and
Israel.

The group of 12 U.S. evangelical pastors met Pres. Ilham Aliyev of
Azerbaijan, the foreign minister, Muslim Sheikhs, local church
leaders, and Israel’s ambassador. Rabbi Schneier told the Associated
Press that Pres. Aliyev “announced during the delegation’s visit that
the country’s first-ever Jewish cultural center would be built in Baku
with Kosher dining options and a hotel to accommodate Jewish guests.”
Schneier heads the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding based in New
York and founded the Hampton Synagogue in Westhampton Beach, New York.
As a sign of their cozy relationship, Azerbaijan’s national airline
flies directly to Tel Aviv and Pres. Aliyev hosted Israel’s prime
minister in 2016. Not surprisingly, Azerbaijan’s Foreign Minister
Elmar Mammadyarov took advantage of his meeting with the evangelical
leaders to disparage Armenia and distort the facts of the Artsakh
conflict. He said, “the recent statements of the Armenian leadership
highlighted that such statements undermine the peace process.”

Pastor Adam Mesa, who leads the Abundant Living Family Church in
Rancho Cucamonga, California, told the Associated Press that it was
his first time in a Muslim majority country. The pastor said he was
encouraged to take part in the trip because of Azerbaijan’s supportive
Israeli stance and interreligious efforts. “It’s incredible that a
Muslim majority country is the one that has to actually lead the
charge on religious dialogue and community and solidarity.”

Rabbi Schneier confirmed to the Associated Press the political agenda
behind the religious group’s visit: “from a political point of view,
listen there is no question you know that Azerbaijan is looking to
strengthen its relationship with the U.S. administration, with the
United States Congress. Israel is very much a conduit to that.”

As in the case of Cong. Alcee Hastings, Azerbaijan seems to have
picked another disgraced individual to disseminate its propaganda. The
60-year-old Rabbi Schneier has been married six times, the last on
March 2017. In February 2018, the State of Florida ordered Schneier to
pay $5,000 a month for $64,594 in unpaid child support he owed to his
third wife for the care of their 19-year-old son. Rabbi Schneier was
expelled in June 2015 by the Rabbinical Council of America for
breaching the code of ethics by carrying on an extramarital
relationship. In June 2010, the Rabbi announced to his congregation
that he was suffering from “bipolar disorder.”

According to Wikipedia, “under pressure from his congregation for his
multiple divorces and philandering, Schneier resigned in 2016 from his
pulpit position at the Hampton Synagogue, which he had founded in
1990. Congregants had threatened to withhold pledges and payments
until he left the synagogue.”

The New York Post reported that after cheating on his third wife,
Rabbi Schneier in 2006 married Tobi Rubinstein, “a sexy worshipper,”
who became wife No. 4. “In 2010, Tobi hired a private investigator who
turned up explicit photos of her husband and Gitty Leiner, a
then-30-something worshipper, getting hot and heavy in the Holy Land
on what Schneier had told his wife was a routine business trip.
Marriage No. 4 ended in divorce soon after.” The Rabbi ended up
marrying Gitty Leiner in 2013—wife No. 5. The couple had a child in
2014, “but then in 2015, Schneir was caught dining out in Queens with
sexy young Simi Teitelbaum” who became his sixth wife in 2017.
Interestingly, The Post reported that “Schneier explained away his
unholy extramarital hookups by saying he was mentally ill and seeking
treatment.”

Rabbi’s ex-wife Toby Gotesman told the Post: “When I left him, he was
making $800,000 … that included a $500,000 salary, plus hundreds of
thousands in additional compensation, including mortgage payments on
his 5,000-square-foot Westhampton Beach home, said to be valued at
around $3 million.”

Rabbi Schneier’s visit to Azerbaijan last week was not his first. He
has been there several times in recent years on propaganda tours. One
wonders if the Rabbi has received any compensation from Pres. Aliyev
for his ‘valuable’ services. His multiple trips to Azerbaijan makes
the Rabbi look more like a lobbyist for Azerbaijan than a religious
figure.

I would urge Armenian evangelical church leaders to contact the 12
pastors who visited Baku last week in order to counter the propaganda
they were fed against Armenia and Artsakh. I would also like to know
if these pastors and Rabbi Schneier came back from Baku with suitcases
full of the usual Azeri “gifts” of caviar, rugs, and other valuable
items.

[MosJan]

[Yervant1]

Panorama, Armenia

March 19 2019

Politics 12:37 19/03/2019 Region

Azerbaijani ambassador to UAE steals 10 jars of caviar intended for Abu Dhabi ruler

Azerbaijan’s Ambassador to the United Arab Emirates Dashgin Shikarov has reportedly appropriated 10 jars of caviar intended as a gift from the Azerbaijani government to Ruler of Abu Dhabi Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan.

In addition, a special commission has been set up at the Azerbaijani Embassy in Abu Dhabi to probe the disappearance of half a million dollars, suspected to have been seized, Azerbaijan media reported.

Shikarov is a highly experienced diplomat. Previously, he headed the diplomatic missions of Azerbaijan in Pakistan and Afghanistan. He began serving as Azerbaijani ambassador to the UAE in January 2016.

After this discovery, the Azerbaijani president is said to have recalled the ambassador.

The case once again comes to prove that Azerbaijan proceeds with its ‘caviar diplomacy.’

https://www.panorama.am/en/news/2019/03/19/Azerbaijani-ambassador-UAE-caviar-Abu-Dhabi-ruler/2087558

[Yervant1]

The Shift

June 29 2019

With friends like Azerbaijan…

by The Shift Team

Reporters Without Borders UK Bureau Director Rebecca Vincent speaking to The Shift News at the Council of Europe building in Strasbourg during the vote on the Special Rapporteur's report on Malta.

An op-ed by Rebecca Vincent, Reporters Without Borders UK Bureau Director.

Did you ever have one of those déjà vu moments? This week it was my turn, at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE). I was there on behalf of Reporters Without Borders, along with colleagues from other freedom of _expression_ organisations, to advocate support for a crucial report and accompanying resolution on the assassination of journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia and rule of law in Malta.

Given the Maltese authorities’ failure to achieve justice for Caruana Galizia’s assassination close to two years after her assassination in a car bomb outside her home, and the government’s resistance to launching an independent public inquiry despite clear deficiencies of the criminal investigation highlighted in reports by European institutions, we expected the Maltese government – and ruling Labour Party members of the Maltese delegation – to attempt to counter the damning findings of the report and turn support away from the resolution.

Indeed, they did. But even more vocal than the Maltese ruling party itself was their somewhat unusual bedfellows from the Azerbaijani delegation.

Caviar Diplomacy and the Azerbaijani Laundromat

Azerbaijan is a country close to my heart, having lived there twice, gotten expelled in connection with my work with local human rights groups, and in the end, having worked predominately on human rights issues and cases from Azerbaijan for a decade.

During that time, many friends and colleagues – journalists, human rights defenders, political activists – were systematically targeted through a range of pressures, including political imprisonment, and from abroad I led international campaigns for their releases.

In the context of that work, I often attended PACE sessions to advocate support for resolutions and other measures aimed at holding the Azerbaijani government to account for its human rights obligations, and to secure the releases of political prisoners. This sometimes felt like a disproportionately difficult uphill battle, and eventually, we found out why.

In 2012, reports of so-called “caviar diplomacy” surfaced – a term coined by the European Stability Initiative in their initial reporting on corrupt lobbying tactics used by Azerbaijan within the Council of Europe and beyond.

In the midst of this, the Azerbaijani delegation celebrated an unlikely victory that was particularly demoralising to us who had worked so hard on the other side. A key report by then-Special Rapporteur Christoph Strässer on the situation of political prisoners in Azerbaijan was narrowly defeated.

Just before the vote took place, head of the Azerbaijani delegation Samad Seyidov made a particularly emboldened statement: “I am completely against the approach it takes to Azerbaijan, but I will still be a member of the Assembly because this is not Mr Strässer’s Council of Europe; it is my Council of Europe, just as it is my Azerbaijan, as it will be forever”. Indeed, it certainly felt like Seyidov’s Council of Europe.

Five years later, in October 2017, details of an even bigger scandal emerged: the ‘Azerbaijani Laundromat’. The Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) uncovered a €2.5 billion fund used by Azerbaijan’s elite in a complex money-laundering and influencing-buying scheme that included payoffs between 2012 and 2014 to politicians to help launder Azerbaijan’s image, including at PACE.

To those of us working on human rights in Azerbaijan, the Laundromat revelations were no surprise: they crystallised and vindicated the things we had felt were happening during those disheartening years of attempting to hold the Azerbaijani government to account at the international level, including at PACE.

For its part, PACE convened an investigation and eventually found that 17 current and former MPs had broken PACE’s Code of Conduct, including Azerbaijan delegation head Seyidov, who was banned from holding any senior post within PACE for two years, as well as from representing PACE at third-party events, but remains able to speak within the assembly.

Two other MPs – Cezar Florin Preda from Romania and Jordi Xuclà from Spain – also received two-year bans with these conditions, and Preda continues to serve in the assembly.

Former PACE president, Spanish MP Pedro Agramunt, received a 10-year ban, but had already resigned his post as president in October 2017 for “personal reasons” before a motion for his dismissal (connected to his participation in a Russian-led trip to meet with Syrian president Bashar al-Assad) could be debated.

In June 2018, 13 other current and former MPs were banned from PACE and the broader Council of Europe for life.

The unholy alliance with Malta

Fast forward to this week at PACE. The day prior to the debate on the resolution on the assassination of Caruana Galizia, ruling party members of the Maltese delegation tabled a series of amendments aimed at weakening and undermining the resolution.

These amendments (ultimately unsuccessful) were supported by…you guessed it…delegates from Azerbaijan. The Azerbaijani delegation also hosted a side event competing with the side event we had organised in support of the Malta resolution, to present on ‘New Challenges and Ongoing Reform in Azerbaijan’ despite nothing of the sort being on the plenary agenda for the week.

The Azerbaijani delegation was out in full force during the plenary debate on the report and resolution, with a staggering four out of 20 total speaking slots taken by Azerbaijani MPs (compared to a modest two spaces for ruling party Maltese delegates themselves). Among them, Seyidov himself, attempting to dismiss the lack of justice for the murder of a journalist with the platitude “nobody’s perfect”, and along with three other Azerbaijani MPs, attacking Pieter Omtzigt’s character and credibility and calling for an investigation into corruption in Europe.

Although Malta’s ruling party MPs refrained from voting (after the deployment of Malta’s diplomatic muscle failed), all six of Azerbaijan’s MPs voted against the resolution.

One lesson can be drawn from the failed results of this unholy alliance, and that is despite the Azerbaijani government escaping largely unscathed for its previously documented corrupt lobbying practices, the era of caviar diplomacy is well and truly over.

As I stated in our side event before the plenary debate, it is an insult to both the intelligence and integrity of the Assembly in its entirety for delegations to continue to behave so crudely and assume they can convince anyone at all, or get their way. And that is the point that the Maltese government, and ruling party members of the Maltese delegation, so clearly missed.

We don’t know what, if any, arrangement might have taken place to secure Azerbaijan’s support in working to influence MPs against the resolution on the assassination of Caruana Galizia. We don’t know why the Azerbaijani delegation – more than the Maltese themselves – so vigorously promoted wrecking amendments or spoke so spectacularly unconvincingly on the floor of the Assembly.

Or perhaps there was no arrangement. Perhaps the Azerbaijani delegation simply viewed it as an injustice – in light of Azerbaijan’s own dismal human rights record, including impunity for past cases of murders of journalists – for PACE to dare to attempt to hold a Council of Europe member state accountable for its obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights.

Perhaps they were still angry with Omtzigt for leading calls for PACE to launch an inquiry into reports of corruption in the assembly and for PACE to write a new report on the issue of political prisoners in Azerbaijan.

Perhaps they were offended by the light the Malta resolution (which mentioned Azerbaijani involvement in examples of corruption in Malta) cast on Azerbaijan, referred to by one Azerbaijani MP who spoke both as “blackmail” and an attempt to damage Azerbaijan’s relations with Europe.

Or perhaps they simply wanted to impress their friends from Malta; their friends who continue to block efforts towards justice for the assassination of a journalist who had been investigating Azerbaijani money-laundering and investment into a secret shell company called 17 Black. Their friends who sell “golden passports”, granting full access to Europe. Their friends who, despite being an EU member state, are moving ever closer to matching the human rights record of their own authoritarian government.

And if that’s the case, really – who needs enemies?

https://theshiftnews.com/2019/06/29/with-friends-like-azerbaijan/?fbclid=IwAR3kQlUk82nM4ttdc47c3craFnHnYNCX71cTP89Pz0FKd_MXDBda6YDX6sw

[Yervant1]

Asbarez.com

Australian Foreign Affairs Dept. to Investigate Azerbaijani Bribe Money

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14 hours ago

http://asbarez.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Eric-Abetz.jpg

Australian Senator Eric Abetz

CANBERRA, Australia—Under parliamentary questioning by Senate’s Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Eric Abetz, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade has promised to investigate Azerbaijani bribe money that has reportedly landed in Australia.

During the Senate Estimates questioning, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade also admitted that Artsakh – which Australia does not yet formally recognize as an independent state – is a “party” to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, reported the Armenian National Committee of Australia.

Mr. Abetz, who is a former cabinet minister and part of the Australian Friends of Artsakh network, questioned First Assistant Secretary of the Europe and Latin Affairs Division of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Ms. Catherine Raper on these issues of importance to Armenian-Australians.

Mr. Abetz drew Ms. Raper’s attention to reporting by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project that indicated over $200,000 of Azerbaijani Laundromat was linked to Australian companies.

The Azerbaijani Laundromat refers to an international money laundering and bribery scheme that saw $2.9 billion funneled into the pockets of European politicians, journalists and organization officials in exchange for silence on Baku’s human rights abuses between 2012 and 2014.

Despite indicating during the last Senate Estimates period that her Department would investigate the report’s findings, Ms. Raper told Mr. Abetz that they were “not aware” of the report or the suggestion that money had found its way into Australia.

Mr. Abetz went on to address the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, and specifically Australia’s position on the conflict’s resolution.

During a previous Senate Estimates, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade stated that it encourages “all parties to work constructively and in good faith with the OSCE Minsk Group to seek a negotiated resolution [to the conflict].”

Mr. Abetz, in response to this, questioned DFAT on whether it considered Artsakh to be a party to the conflict “when we say that all parties should be gathering around to resolve the conflict” – to which the Department affirmed that it does recognize Artsakh as a party to the conflict despite not recognizing the Republic of Artsakh as an independent state.

“Recognizing Artsakh as a party to the conflict is an important step towards eventual recognition of Artsakh’s right to self-determination,” said Haig Kayserian, Executive Director of the Armenian National Committee of Australia.

“What this establishes is that the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade accepts that there should be, to paraphrase Senator Abetz, a ‘seat at the table’ for the representatives of Artsakh to negotiate their future status within the current OSCE format,” he continued.

The Republic of Artsakh has been routinely excluded from the OSCE Minsk Group process due to the intransigence of Azerbaijan, despite Artsakh being one of the original signatories to the 1994 ceasefire agreement which ended the war.

“Azerbaijan’s position has been to try to cajole Armenia into unilaterally conceding Artsakh’s territories in exchange for a future determination of status,” Kayserian added.

“Armenian-Australians believe that no pathway to peace can include handing Artsakh to a dictatorship that has routinely and systematically violated the rights of the Armenian people.”

“By including Artsakh in the negotiation process and giving it the right to determine its own future, which is also what the Armenian government is calling for, is a step in the right direction for ensuring the right to self-determination is respected.”

Kayserian thanked Mr. Abetz for his line of questioning, and the responses by Ms. Raper.

“Mr. Abetz was able to ensure the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade brought important information to light, including a promise to investigate if Azerbaijani bribe money eventually found its way to Australia,” he said.

“We are also pleased that the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade accepts Artsakh is a party to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.”

 

 

http://asbarez.com/187632/australian-foreign-affairs-dept-to-investigate-azerbaijani-bribe-money/?fbclid=IwAR0hm0Kd36PItRkG2uIeBYdpRQtHmmRtH0LYnmI7AK0O297LWHl-qngqkQU

[MosJan]

woW

[Yervant1]

Arminfo, Armenia

Jan 31 2020

German Bundestag deputies lose parliamentary immunity due to allegations of bribery as part of the sensational case of the Azerbaijani "landromat" in PACE

ArmInfo. The Bundestag of Germany on January 30 deprived parliamentary immunity of the deputy from the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) Karin Strenz from Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. She is accused of taking a bribe of at least 22 thousand euros to lobby for the interests of Azerbaijan in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE).

According to Deutsche Welle, last year the German parliament fined Strents 20 thousand euros. In connection with the investigation into Strentz, about 100 employees of the prosecutor's office, the Federal Criminal Office and the Belgian police searched the premises on 16 eve of the night: in the Bundestag's office of the deputy, her personal apartment in Berlin, as well as in the premises, offices and law firms in Berlin, the federal states of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Bavaria, as well as in Belgium. Together with her in the case is the ex-deputy of the Bundestag from the Bavarian Christian Social Union (CSU), the former parliamentary state secretary to the Minister of the Interior, Eduard Lintner.

The Bundestag deprived the immunity of the leader of the right-wing populist faction Lintner, according to the prosecutor's office, from 2008 to 2016 he received from Azerbaijan about 4 million euros through shell companies in the UK, which had accounts in banks in the Baltic countries. He redirected a significant part of this money, minus his remuneration, to individual PACE members who were supposed to speak positively about the elections in Azerbaijan and oppose the demands for the release of political prisoners in this country.

In this case, there is also a third suspect, on the bribery and lobbying of the interests of Azerbaijan, whose name the investigation has not yet disclosed. He is accused of creating a shell company and opening bank accounts through his law office to transfer money from Azerbaijan to bribe PACE members. On Thursday, January 30, the Bundestag deprived parliamentary immunity of the leader of the faction of the right-wing populist party "Alternative for Germany" (AdG) Alexander Gauland. The decision was made at the request of the Frankfurt am Main Prosecutor's Office, seeking permission to search Gauland for suspicion of tax evasion. Frankfurt prosecutors ordered searches of the apartments in Gauland at his place of residence in Frankfurt am Main and Potsdam. The policy is blamed for the incorrect preparation of tax returns on their income for several years.

Recall that suspicions against Karin Strents appeared in 2017 during a corruption scandal in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE). In particular, her name is mentioned in a report published in April 2018 by a group of independent experts on bribes for lobbying for the interests of Baku in Europe. The document claims that a key person involved in the corruption scandal, former Bundestag deputy Eduard Lintner hired her to work through his Line M-Trade consulting company, which was funded by Baku and lobbying for the interests of Azerbaijan. Strents later stated that she did not know the source of the company's financing. In connection with suspicions, in early 2018 she was expelled from the Bundestag delegation to PACE.

https://arminfo.info/full_news.php?id=48957&lang=3

[Yervant1]

Armenpress.am

Azerbaijani ex-banker’s wife loses London appeal over unexplained wealth orders

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14:00, 6 February, 2020

YEREVAN, FEBRUARY 6, ARMENPRESS. The London Court of Appeal has rejected an Azerbaijani banker’s wife Zamira Hajiyeva's attempt to stop the UK's first ever Unexplained Wealth Order from being implemented against her.

Hajiyeva spent £16m of unexplained wealth in Harrods in a decade.

Hajiyeva must reveal how she became wealthy enough to buy a mansion near Harrods and a golf course in Berkshire.

She faces losing the properties if she can't provide proof of income, the BBC reported.

Hajiyeva's husband, Jahangir Hajiyev, was the chairman of the state-controlled International Bank of Azerbaijan from 2001 until his resignation in 2015, and was later jailed for 15 years for fraud and embezzlement.

Dismissing the appeal on Wednesday, Lord Justice Burnett, the Lord Chief Justice, also refused to allow Hajiyeva to take the case to the Supreme Court - and ordered her to pay the National Crime Agency's (NCA) legal costs.

In the judgment, Lord Justice Burnett and two other senior judges said that Hajiyeva had been lawfully targeted by the first ever Unexplained Wealth Order (UWO) two years ago.

"The relevant requirement for making a UWO [is that] the court must be satisfied that there are reasonable grounds for suspecting that the known sources of the lawfully obtained income available [to the targeted individual] would have been insufficient to enable him or her to obtain the property," said the judges as quoted by the BBC.

The Azerbaijani woman must now present the sources of her wealth, including how she was able to buy her £15m home and the Mill Ride Golf Course in Berkshire.

Sarah Pritchard, of the NCA's National Economic Crime Centre, said it was a "significant result".

"As a new piece of legislation we anticipated that there would be legal challenge," she said. "We are pleased that the court has upheld the case today. It will set a helpful precedent for future UWO cases."

 

 

https://armenpress.am/eng/news/1003901.html?fbclid=IwAR0yhTecDoCLnDTQqdUVhbdQaY4zHjxWf6LWRhai2ebXQUuATU1ObHMUsmc

[Yervant1]

The Times of Israel

Oct 27 2020

Report: Israeli arms manufacturers paid millions to Azeris through Russian bank

Following a FinCEN Files report that Israel Aerospace Industries paid suspicious sums to a reported slush fund for Azeri elites, new report reveals Russian involvement

By SIMONA WEINGLASS 27 October 2020, 6:18 am

Last month, The Times of Israel reported that Israel’s largest aerospace manufacturer, Israel Aerospace Industries, transferred at least $155 million in 2012-2014 to two companies that were reportedly used as a secret slush fund for Azerbaijan’s kleptocratic elite.

A new report published earlier this month on Russian investigative reporting website Important Stories reveals that a second Israeli state-owned arms manufacturer, Israel Military Industries Ltd (IMI Systems Ltd), transferred close to $5 million in 2017 to one of these two same “slush fund” companies.

In addition, Important Stories has reported, the bank accounts for these two offshore companies were serviced by the Russian bank International Financial Club, which is part owned by the wife of Sergei Chemezov, the CEO of Russia’s state-owned arms manufacturer and exporter, Rostec. In other words, a bank that is partly owned by the wife of a US-sanctioned Putin ally performed a key role in suspicious payments from two state-owned Israeli arms manufacturers to offshore companies reportedly controlled by members of the Azeri elite.

The Important Stories report is based on a suspicious activity report (or SAR) filed by The Bank of New York with the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network of the United States Department of the Treasury (FinCEN) in December 2017. The SAR became public as part of a leak of FinCEN documents that the BuzzFeed news site shared with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and with 108 other media outlets and some 400 journalists around the world. Important Stories is the ICIJ’s partner in Russia.

The submission of a suspicious activity report to FinCEN does not mean that the individual or company mentioned in the document has done anything illegal. The transactions described in such reports can be part of entirely legitimate business activities that happened to conform to patterns that aroused the suspicion of the financial institution reporting them.

According to the Important Stories report, in December 2017, The Bank of New York filed an SAR concerning a $5 million payment from IMI Systems Ltd. to the British Virgin Islands company Jetfield Network.

Jetfield Network was founded in New Zealand in 2009 and was later incorporated in the Marshall Islands in February 2012. It originally described itself as engaged in commerce, including the buying and selling of construction equipment, but later branched out into “consulting services.”

The company’s beneficiary is Javid Huseynov, an Azeri man born in 1961. Huseynov is also the beneficiary of Larkstone Ltd., a company incorporated in Estonia, according to reporting by journalist Uri Blau and Hashomrim-the Center for Media and Democracy, which is ICIJ’s partner in Israel. Huseynov does not have much of a public profile and the Important Stories report suggested that he may be a nominee owner.

As reported by Blau and Hashomrim, Jetfield and Larkstone together received over $150 million in payments from Israel Aerospace Industries in 2012-2014, shortly after the company signed a $1.6 billion arms deal with Azerbaijan.

Important Stories further revealed that from June 2016 to May 2017 Israel Aerospace Industries paid $ 2.8 million to a British Virgin Islands firm called. Bakinshaat Group Ltd., whose website describes it as a construction company involved in government projects in Azerbaijan. According to Important Stories, all three companies, Jetfield, Larkstone and Bakinshaat Group, had bank accounts with International Financial Club.

Jetfield and Larkstone were revealed in a 2017 expose by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) to be central nodes in what became known as The Azerbaijani Laundromat.

The OCCRP revealed that Jetfield and Larkstone paid money into companies that were used as a slush fund by cronies of the regime of Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev to purchase luxury goods as well as to buy good PR for the regime.

For instance, more than 2 million euros that left Azerbaijan, with a portion going through Jetfield, reportedly ended up in 2012 in the bank account of Italian politician Luca Volontè, Rome’s representative to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE). Italian police suspect that in exchange for the payment, Volontè tried to soften the European Council criticisms of human rights violations in Azerbaijan. The investigation, launched in 2015, is ongoing.

According to Important Stories, it is odd that while Jetfield Network is registered in the British Virgin Islands, it was serviced by the Russian bank International Financial Club.

International Financial Club’s main shareholder is a businessman by the name of Mikhail Prokhorov (he owns 47.8%). Interestingly 6.5% of the company’s shares are owned by Ekaterina Ignatova, the wife of the head of Rostec, Sergei Chemezov.

Chemezov is CEO of Rostec, the state-owned Russian conglomerate that controls weapons manufacturing in Russia. Chemezov is under US Treasury Department sanctions for being a Russian government official and is barred from entering the United States. The Treasury Department has described Chemezov as “a trusted ally of President Putin, whom he has known since the 1980’s when they lived in the same apartment complex in East Germany.”

According to Important Stories, in 2016 compliance officers at The Bank of New York got in touch with International Financial Club to ask why a company from the British Virgin Islands was being serviced by a Russian bank and why it had received funds from an Israeli arms supplier to Azerbaijan.

International Financial Club replied that Jetfield Network had had an account with the bank since August 2015 and that its main activity was providing consulting and marketing services.

In 2009, Israel became a signatory to the OECD Convention on Combating Bribery of Foreign Public Officials in International Business Transactions, which criminalizes bribery of foreign government officials.

According to Important Stories, while it makes no sense on its face that two state-owned Israeli arms manufacturers would need a Russian bank to transfer payments to offshore companies associated with the Azeri elite, this pattern of payments suggests that “the owners of the International Financial Club and the people behind the offshore intermediaries may have a close relationship… because in such ‘delicate transactions,’ when it comes to arms shipments and payments to offshore intermediaries, it is important to have a trusting relationship with bankers so that transactions are not immediately blocked.”

Russia plays both sides in the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan. It has a military alliance with Armenia as well as a military base in the country, but it also sells weapons to Azerbaijan.

The fact that an individual close to the Russian regime is linked to payments from Israeli weapons companies to Azeris raises questions of what kind of leverage or access Russia might have to Israeli state-owned arms manufacture.

Israel Aerospace Industries is a longtime collaborator with the US defense contractor Boeing in developing the advanced Arrow missile defense system.

Israeli journalist Yossi Melman recently reported in Foreign Policy that Israeli counterintelligence officials believe both China and Russia are spying on Israel, in part in order to steal US military secrets.

It has been widely reported that Israel is the top supplier of arms to Azerbaijan, including of lethal “kamikaze” drones that some analysts believe have helped Azerbaijan gain an edge over Armenia in the current hostilities in Nagorno-Karabakh.

The United States provides military equipment to Azerbaijan as well.

In a 2020 report, Human Rights Watch describes Azerbaijan as a country with a poor human rights record: “Azerbaijan’s authorities continued to maintain rigid control, severely curtailing freedoms of association, _expression_, and assembly.“

Critics of Israeli weapons sales to Azerbaijan have argued that Israel is siding with the oppressive dictatorship of Azerbaijan as opposed to its democratizing neighbor. Others have said that Israel should support Armenia, or at least not actively arm its enemy, out of respect for Jews’ and Armenians’ shared historical experience of genocide. Last week, activist Elie Yossef, a longtime critic of Israeli arms sales to despotic regimes, petitioned Israel’s High Court of Justice to force Israel to halt all arms sales to Azerbaijan immediately.

“The moment that Azeri forces invade and conquer Nagorno-Karabakh, with aerial cover and massive bombing, there will have to be a miracle to prevent massive slaughter of Armenians there,” he wrote in the petition. (While there is no evidence of genocide in the current Nagorno-Karabakh hostilities, scholars have said there is a possible genocide risk.)

Defenders of Israel’s arms sales point out that Azerbaijan is strategically located next to Israel’s archenemy, Iran. It is reported that Azerbaijan has agreed to let Israel use its airfields in the event of a potential armed conflict with Iran.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/report-israeli-arms-manufacturers-paid-millions-to-azeris-through-russian-bank/amp/?fbclid=IwAR3p_IKU7Ie4xjc2JkI0Wt4vpOweBMvvsctgM53rkg558bEKLozln1F3U84

[Yervant1]

Offshore company purchases luxurious London apartment for son of Azerbaijani top official

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18:11, 3 November, 2020

YEREVAN, NOVEMBER 3, ARMENPRESS. Juma Ahmadzada, son of head of Azerbaijan’s state water resources management company Ahmad Ahmadzada, lives in a luxury apartment in the heart of London, but the apartment has been purchased not by him, but an offshore firm called Vremax Properties Limited, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) said in an investigative report.

Azerbaijan’s state water resources management company led by Ahmad Ahmadzada has signed two beneficial contracts with construction companies owned by Turkish multi-millionaire Mehmet Cengiz. Several months after signing a contract, another company controlled by Cengiz in London has paid a consultancy fee of $3.07 million to Vremax.

Several months after the payment, Vremax purchased a $2.3-million luxury apartment in the heart of London. The apartment was already occupied by a young businessman from Azerbaijan, Juma Ahmadzada. Vremax immediately gave him permission to keep living there. What’s more, two years after the initial purchase, the secretive offshore company bought two other apartments next door and allowed Ahmadzada to remodel them, creating a truly palatial residence for him.

OCCRP has seen no direct evidence that the apartment represented a bribe. The owners of Vremax are unknown, as is whether the firm did any real consulting work and whether it had any other sources of income. Finally, the specific role that may have been played by Mehmet Cengiz, Juma Ahmadzada, or his father, Ahmad, in these arrangements is unknown.

The heart of the mystery lies in the offshore secrecy that makes Vremax’s true nature nearly impossible to discover. That’s why the affair warrants further investigation, according to two corruption specialists who reviewed OCCRP’s findings.

[Yervant1]

Panorama, Armenia

Jan 12 2021

Former Italian lawmaker involved in Azerbaijani “Caviar Diplomacy” sentenced to four year in prison

The former Chairman of the Parliamentary Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights of the Council of Europe, Luca Volonte, was sentenced to four years in jail on Monday for taking a bribe from two Azerbaijan politicians to get the Council of Europe to pull a critical report on political prisoners in Azerbaijan, He was found guilty of taking about two million euros from the Azeri politicians, who were given the same four-year sentence, ANSA news agency reported.

Luca Volonte has been involved in the international 'Caviar Diplomacy' scandal, according to the investigation of the international NGO European Stability Initiative. He was accused of receiving 2.3 million euros from Azerbaijan, which was spent on bribing a number of PACE deputies to fail the report on political prisoners in Azerbaijan.

To remind, in early 2013, the Council of Europe discussed a critical report concerning the treatment of political prisoners in Azerbaijan, presented by Christoph Straesser, a German Social Democrat member of the parliamentary assembly of the Council.

According to investigators, Volontè had been tasked by Azerbaijani officials to “direct votes within his parliamentary group” in favor of the country. He also sought the support of Spanish EPP member Pedro Agramunt to divide the socialist group and vote down the Straesser report. The report was eventually rejected by 125 to 79. The strong criticism on human rights in Azerbaijan, an oil-rich country classified as “not free” by the U.S-based democracy watchdog Freedom House, was then rejected.

https://www.panorama.am/en/news/2021/01/12/caviar-diplomacy-Volonte-Azerbaijan/2433958

[Yervant1]

Public Radio of Armenia

Jan 20 2021

Polish politician offered $50,000 to refuse from publishing a brochure on Azerbaijan’s war crimes against Armenians

Polish politician offered $50,000 to refuse from publishing a brochure on Azerbaijan’s war crimes against Armenians – Public Radio of Armenia

Polish politician Tomasz Lech Buczek says he was offered $50,000 for canceling the publication of a brochure on Azerbaijani war crimes against Armenians.

Buczek shared a screenshot of a message he received from an Azerbaijani user reading “The Azerbaijani government will give you $50,000, if you don’t publish the publication about Azerbaijani crimes. If interested, please post a photo of Baku on January 25th on Facebook.”

“President Aliyev probably heard about my publication?” My response to Baku is: ‘Release the Armenian prisoners of war’,” Buczek captioned the screenshot.

Buczek earlier announced a fundraiser to publish the brochure that would be the world’s first printed publication on Azerbaijan’s war crimes against the Armenian population in Artsakh.

The publication specifically details the tortures and inhuman treatment of Armenian war prisoners held in Azerbaijan.

Tomasz Lech Buczek, author of “The Cry of the Armenian Mother, Genocide in Sumgait, 1988” has also initiated the establishment of a civilian committee for recognizing the independence of Artsakh.

https://en.armradio.am/2021/01/20/polish-politician-offered-50000-to-refuse-from-publishing-a-brochure-on-azerbaijans-war-crimes-against-armenians/

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Armenpress.am

Another German lawmaker quits amid lobbying allegations involving Azerbaijan

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13:43, 12 March, 2021

YEREVAN, MARCH 12, ARMENPRESS. German lawmaker Mark Hauptmann (CDU) has resigned amid lobbying allegations, Deutsche Welle reports.

Hauptmann's departure follows a report by news magazine Spiegel over Azerbaijani, Taiwanese and Vietnamese tourism ads run in the "Südthüringer Kurier," a CDU-near local newspaper he publishes. He had been accused of accepting money from foreign agencies.

He denies wrongdoing.

Mark Hauptmann is the third German parliamentarian among Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservatives to exit over lobbying claims.

On March 5, the Bundestag stripped MP Axel Fischer from immunity to pave way for an investigation into alleged bribery from Azeri authorities.

https://armenpress.am/eng/news/1045877.html?fbclid=IwAR0yd9EsNRcFO9JQ_oNDseOjpWRU-Kmk_CncCGkNIgsyWqxPWAmX509oUqs

[Yervant1]

 

standard.co.uk

 

Evening Standard victory as couple accused of bringing £14m of ‘dirty’ cash into Britain can be named

By

Martin Bentham

@martinbentham

1 day ago

A

London couple accused of bringing £14 million of “dirty money” from Azerbaijan into Britain should be named, a judge ruled today in a major step forward in the fight against secret justice.

District Judge Vanessa Baraitser said that continuing to conceal the couple’s identities would be a disproportionate interference with the principle of open justice as she lifted an anonymity order protecting their names.

The judge — who was making her ruling at Westminster magistrates court in response to an application by the Evening Standard backed by the National Crime Agency — added that there were also no grounds for holding any of a forthcoming forfeiture hearing involving the “laundromat” couple in secret.

Instead, full details of the allegations against them will be made public. In a concession to the couple, the judge granted a seven day “stay” on naming the couple — who own several multi-million pound London properties and face the seizure of around £6.5 million in their bank accounts — to allow them to seek a judicial review of her decision.

The pair’s lawyers have said they want a High Court injunction and permission for judicial review on the grounds that lifting anonymity will interfere with other proceedings. But if their bid fails the couple’s names will finally be made public next week.

The couple, who can only be referred to as X and Y, are accused by the National Crime Agency of using a complex web of “brass plate” companies in locations ranging from the Seychelles to Potters Bar to launder illicit money made by the “ruling elite” in Azerbaijan.

The NCA alleges that the money was moved via banks in Estonia and Latvia into accounts at Coutts, Barclays, Lloyds, Santander and Metro Bank and told a previous court hearing that allegedly fake invoices for £500 million worth of steel were one method used to mask the money transfers.

It has also disclosed that several of the companies involved in transferring money to the couple have been identified as involved in the Azerbaijan laundromat — a scheme under which billions of pounds made via corruption was moved by the Azeri elite to the West to buy property and fund their lifestyles overseas.

In her ruling today, Judge Baraitser says that there is a “public interest in informed public debate” about account forfeiture orders.

She adds: “Such debate is stimulated and enhanced by the identities of the parties being revealed… and, in accordance with the usual principle of open justice the public has a right to know who they are.

“In this case the press has a legitimate journalistic purpose in reporting these proceedings, namely to inform the public about the process of forfeiture and to contribute to public debate about the flow of “dirty” money into the United Kingdom and its laundering through our financial institutions.

“In all of the circumstances, I have concluded that an anonymity order preventing the disclosure of their names would now be a disproportionate interference with the principle of open justice and with article 10 of the European Convention of Human Rights. I am satisfied that lifting anonymity is both proportionate and necessary.”

The judge points out that the Evening Standard had submitted that its “purpose in reporting these proceedings is to contribute to public debate, in this case the use of the UK’s financial systems to launder large sums of money derived from unlawful sources in Azerbaijan.”

She said this had not been contested by the couple’s lawyers and nor had the newspaper’s argument that the case also “raises important questions about the safeguards that are in place against such activity, and about the visa policy operated by the Home Office which enables access to the UK’s systems.”

She added that a previous judge had found that this newspaper had a “proper journalistic purpose” in wanting to report the proceedings and identify the couple.

Judge Baraitser said the couple, who had originally sought a fully private forfeiture hearing which the press would have been unable to report, had also provided no evidence to support a subsequent application for proceedings to be conducted partially behind closed doors.

She said there was no reason to allow this, stating in her judgment that: “The burden of displacing the general rule as to publicity lies on the Respondents [X and Y].... and there is no evidence before me which would justify a derogation from the usual principle of open justice.

“As no substantive reasons have been advanced to depart from the usual principle I reject the application that the forfeiture hearing, or any part of it, should be heard in private.”

This newspaper has been fighting for nearly two years to name the couple as part of a court battle that is also intended to make it easier for the media to report future “dirty money” forfeiture cases.

The couple deny wrongdoing and are contesting the forfeiture of their accounts.

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/crime/evening-standard-victory-14m-cash-couple-azerbaijan-can-named-b937553.html

[Yervant1]

Public Radio of Armenia

June 10 2021

Swedish Bombardier executive charged for Azerbaijan bribery

A former manager at the Swedish branch of Bombardier Transportation, a major engineering company, has been indicted on Wednesday on charges of aggravated bribery in what is one of Sweden’s biggest ever corruption scandals, OCCRP reports.

Thomas Bimer, a former business area manager at Bombardier in Sweden, will now face trial for his role in the allegedly corrupt tender that Bombardier won in Azerbaijan in 2013.

Prosecutors argue the $350 million contract to install signaling systems for a section of Azeri railway involved Bombardier paying a $100 million bribe to at least one mid-ranking railway executive.

“[bimer] was the head of the department in charge of this project. We believe that he was aware that Bombardier colluded with the customer in Azerbaijan,” Prosecutor Staffan Edlund, of the National Anti-Corruption Unit, told OCCRP.

The allegedly bribed Azeri railway executive also represented a local business, Trans-Signal-Rabita (TSR), which won the tender together with the Swedish company. TSR and Bombardier Sweden rigged the tender so that Bombardier Sweden would win it, according to the indictment now being filed in the Stockholm District Court.

Both Mr Bimer and Bombardier deny any wrongdoing, as does the Azeri railway executive, says the prosecutor, although Swedish investigators have not been able to question the latter.

Furthermore, it is likely that there were other employees at the railway authority in Azerbaijan who received a cut of the payments.

The prosecutor notes that Swedish Bombardier’s former CEO was previously also suspected of bribery, along with several others, yet the insufficiency of evidence means there is not enough to prove any guilt in his case.

Bombardier Sweden has since been sold to the French company Alstom, but it still risks being excluded from any future World Bank-financed projects. The financial institution has reportedly not made any final decisions.

 

https://en.armradio.am/2021/06/10/swedish-bombardier-executive-charged-for-azerbaijan-bribery/

[Yervant1]

Armenpress.com

Aliyev’s cousin brought £14 million from Azerbaijan to UK through money laundering, Evening Standard reveals

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15:29, 30 June, 2021

YEREVAN, JUNE 30, ARMENPRESS. A British court has revealed the identity of the couple who illegally brought £14 million to UK through the “Azerbaijan laundromat”, Armenpress reports citing Evening Standard.

Izzat Khanim Javadova, an oligarch’s daughter who performs as a DJ using the name Mikaela Jav, and Suleyman Javadov are accused by the National Crime Agency of using the proceeds of corruption to finance their life in the capital.

It is trying to seize their multi-million pound bank accounts and has told a court that the money is being laundered in this country after being transferred here via a complex web of transactions, including fake invoices for vast quantities of steel, to hide its illicit origin.

The pair own several London homes between them worth millions of pounds, including a flat in Whitehall with views over the Thames, a riverside home in Twickenham, and an upmarket apartment in Clerkenwell.

They are also understood to own a villa overlooking the sea in Ibiza and a luxury flat on the party island, as well as an extensive property portfolio in Azerbaijan.

They deny any wrongdoing and had managed to persuade the courts to keep their identities secret until now on the grounds that revealing their names would damage their reputation.

But in a victory for the Evening Standard, which has been fighting a court battle for nearly two years to have the veil of secrecy lifted, an anonymity order protecting them finally expired today to allow the couple to be named.

Ms Javadova is the cousin of Azerbaijan’s ruler Ilham Aliyev and the daughter of a former Azerbaijan MP Jalal Aliyev, the former ruler’s brother. She came to London at least ten years ago and was given a visa by the Home Office because of her wealth.

She set up a London company called Love the Underground Records and used it to stage dance parties in parties in London at venues including Kensington Roof Gardens and numerous events in Ibiza.

A forfeiture hearing at which the National Crime Agency is seeking to seize around £6.5 million in accounts at Coutts, Barclays, Lloyds, Metro Bank and Santander held by either Mr Javadov or Ms Javadova is due to be begin next week.

The couple have claimed in evidence to investigators that their wealth came from rental income from their property portfolio in Azerbaijan.

But the National Crime Agency has told Westminster Magistrates court that it believes the true source was corruption and that any genuine income did not match the large sums sent to London.

The court documents allege that the money sent to the Javadovs’ accounts came via 21 “brass plate” companies operating from locations ranging from the Seychelles and the Marshall Islands to Potters Bar and Ayr and banks in Estonia and Latvia.

They say that six of these companies have been named separately as part of the “Azerbaijan laundromat” scheme – under which vast sums have been chanelled out of the former Soviet state to support the lifestyle of the country’s ruling elite - and that they in turn had already received funds from other “laundromat” companies.

 

 

https://armenpress.am/eng/news/1056974.html?fbclid=IwAR3P5bMJWyg61KQ6jG08hjawIYCxBRW7OyXWKcBC3cDhfzdtN9UoyywHzHo

[Yervant1]

VOA

UK Judge Orders Family of Azerbaijani MP to Forfeit $7.6 Million

Baku, Azerbaijan. A British judge this week ordered the family of an
Azerbaijani lawmaker to forfeit some $7.6 million to the National
Crime Agency on the grounds that the funds were illegally brought into
Britain.

The judgment against the family of Javanshir Feyziyev, a member of
Azerbaijan's parliament, relates to the so-called Azerbaijani
Laundromat, a complex money-laundering scheme that was initially
exposed by Danish newspaper Berlingske and the Organized Crime and
Corruption Reporting Project in 2017.

Records indicate that four United Kingdom-registered shell companies
processed some $2.9 billion in transactions, which Azerbaijan's ruling
elite were allegedly using to bribe European politicians, buy luxury
goods and enrich themselves.

Azerbaijan's government routinely ranks low on Transparency
International's Corruption Perceptions Index reflecting the country's
continuing struggle to make gains in democratic elections, judicial
independence and free press.

"The current kleptocratic system owes its existence to corruption and
bribery," Azerbaijani human rights defender and former prosecutor
Rufat Safarov told VOA.

Once imprisoned by Azerbaijan authorities on what international human
rights organizations deemed politically motivated charges, Safarov
considers graft to be almost standard for governance in his country.

"The state governing structures — institutions tasked with the fight
against corruption — not only fail to fulfill their functions, but in
government structures, inclination toward bribery is ordinary,"
Safarov said.

According to economist Gubad Ibadoglu, in Azerbaijan, the fight
against corruption is an imitation. In his view, the endemic
corruption has affected judiciary, police and even social security
organs of the state.

"Corruption is intertwined with political system and authoritarian
governance," Ibadoglu told VOA, adding that all branches of the
government are under the thumb of the executive branch.

Azerbaijani authorities, however, persistently reject such assessments
of the country's record on corruption.

Gunay Selimzade, press officer for the prosecutor general, states that
her government takes "intensive measures" to remedy corruption in the
spheres of legislation, criminal investigation and raising public
awareness.

"The fight against corruption in Azerbaijan via institutional and
criminal investigative measures has been highly assessed by experts of
the influential international organizations," she told VOA.

Kamran Aliyev, the country's chief prosecutor, recently touted some
statistics as evidence of the ongoing struggle against corruption.
According to him, police have closed criminal corruption
investigations involving nearly 500 individuals in 2021.

Independent observers view such numbers more as an attempt to cover up
the government's poor record of combating corruption. According to
Ibadoglu, reducing corruption will depend on the establishment of rule
of law and an independent judiciary that can investigate charges of
corruption.

To date, very few top officials have been charged or prosecuted on
charges stemming from financial scandals reported abroad, including
the notorious Azerbaijani Laundromat case.

This story originated in VOA's Azerbaijan Service.

https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.voanews.com/a/uk-judge-orders-family-of-azerbaijani-mp-to-forfeit-7-6-million/6424080.html__;!!LIr3w8kk_Xxm!5_sHvv8D8e0GidmJIrAvw3NZLa1vykonYdv7WR8eTyJuUPZAPU-v_WzZVM60Dw$

[Yervant1]

OCCRP

Sons of Azerbaijani Strongman Vasif Talibov Received Millions From
Money Laundering Systems

Feb. 20, 2022

[Having opened bank accounts with Credit Suisse, Barclays, and other
foreign banks, Rza and Seymur Talibov received over $20 million in
suspicious wire transfers, even as the people of the Azerbaijani
exclave of Nakhchivan suffered under their father’s dictatorial rule.]

Key Findings

The Talibov brothers’ bank accounts received dozens of wire
transfers from shell companies that were part of the Azerbaijani and
Troika Laundromats, two massive money laundering systems previously
uncovered by OCCRP.

A financial crime expert who reviewed the transactions found
multiple red flags for money laundering that he said banks should have
noticed.

In subsequent years, the brothers bought up properties in Dubai
and Georgia worth an estimated $63 million.

In late 2007, two young Azerbaijani brothers received an infusion of
cash just in time for the holidays.

But this wasn’t pocket money. Nineteen-year-old Seymur had $40,000
transferred to his personal bank account on December 27. On the same
day, his 25-year-old brother Rza got $95,000 of his own.

As an explanation, both transactions listed simply the word “textile.”
This was strange, since these were not corporate accounts — and the
brothers had no known connection to any textile business.

It didn’t end there. Within months, Seymur and Rza both started to
receive more cash, in much larger bank transfers — up to $500,000 at a
time, often in implausibly round figures. The listed reasons for the
transfers expanded to include “metal,” “metal parts,” and “electrical
equipment.” By the end of 2012, they had received over $20 million in
total.

Clearly, these weren’t ordinary transactions. But then, these were not
ordinary brothers.

Seymur and Rza are the sons of one of Azerbaijan’s top officials:
Their father, Vasif Talibov, is the ruler of Nakhchivan, an autonomous
exclave located between Iran, Turkey, and Armenia.

Talibov has led Nakhchivan with an iron fist for more than 26 years.
Under his rule, detainees have been subject to beatings and vicious
torture. Dissidents have been forced into psychiatric hospitals. He
has also used his power to silence independent media: Journalists and
activists who criticized his rule have faced pressure, arrest, and
exile.

Now, through an analysis of several leaks of banking data and property
records, OCCRP can show that the Talibov family enriched itself from
questionable sources even as Nakhchivan’s people suffered.

Leaked banking records show that the millions Talibov’s sons received
came from shell companies associated with the Azerbaijani and Troika
Laundromats, massive money laundering schemes discovered by OCCRP.
Previous investigations showed that Azerbaijani elites, including a
cousin of President Ilham Aliyev, benefitted from one of these
systems. Now the powerful Talibov family — which is also connected to
the president by marriage — can be added to the list.

The data obtained by reporters doesn’t show what the Talibovs did with
the money they received. But soon after the transactions began, they
started spending.

In 2008, the elder Talibov brother, Rza, his mother, a cousin, and
several businessmen founded a bank together.

Four years later, just as the Laundromat transactions reached their
peak, Rza bought two adjacent buildings in the Georgian resort town of
Batumi that he converted into a five-star hotel. Rza, Seymur, and
their sister Baharkhanim — who also received nearly a million dollars
from Laundromat companies — have also acquired about a dozen
properties in Dubai, including a luxurious villa, a 12-floor apartment
hotel, and multiple individual apartments. In total, their properties
are worth an estimated $63 million.

Azerbaijan's Totalitarian Fortress

In Nakhchivan, Vasif Talibov’s word is law. He has ruled over the
isolated territory through fear and violence for years — and hardly
any news gets out.

This is despite Vasif Talibov’s official salary of less than $26,000
per year and his sons’ own low-paying government jobs. (Rza is a
migration service official and Seymur is a member of the Nakhchivan
parliament.)

In fact, their family’s political status should have subjected their
financial transactions to greater scrutiny. The bank accounts where
they received their millions were held with major financial
institutions in multiple countries, including Emirates NBD, Barclays,
and Credit Suisse. It is unknown whether any of the transactions were
flagged as suspicious.

Graham Barrow, an independent financial crime specialist who reviewed
the transactions, said the brothers’ accounts should have been flagged
given their questionable origins and the Talibovs’ status as
politically exposed persons.

“[The banks] should do what’s known as adverse media screening,” he
said. “They should see whether their client has been involved in any
potential criminal activity or suspicious activity and they should
monitor them. It’s called enhanced monitoring.”

“It’s ridiculous. Those round figures, it’s just stupid. I mean,
nobody does business that way.”

In response to inquiries from OCCRP and Süddeutsche Zeitung, Credit
Suisse said it could not comment on individual client relationships
and rejected “allegations and inferences about [its] purported
business practices.” (Click here to read the bank’s full response to
the Suisse Secrets project).

Two other banks where the Talibovs held accounts that received
questionable funds, Vontobel and Emirates NBD, said that they could
not comment on client relationships but that they complied with the
law.

Barclays and members of the Talibov family did not respond to requests
for comment.

“A World Upside-Down”

Vasif Talibov has ruled over Nakhchivan for so long that it’s hard to
imagine the territory without him. But his beginnings were modest: In
the late Soviet years he was the head of a department at a local
garment factory.

His ticket to power turned out to be his marriage to Sevil Sultanova,
whose mother’s uncle was a senior Soviet official named Heydar Aliyev.

As the country neared collapse in 1990, Aliyev returned from Moscow to
his home region of Nakhchivan. Having nowhere else to stay, he
temporarily lived with Talibov in his two-bedroom apartment.

He returned the favor the following year. After being elected chairman
of Nakhchivan’s parliament, Aliyev made Talibov, then in his early
30s, his head assistant.

“When I chose Vasif Talibov for this position, I knew many of his
characteristics,” Aliyev said later. “He was very young. Inwardly, I
thought for a while that it would be difficult because of his youth.
But he proved that a person who is loyal to his homeland, nation and
people, regardless of age, can do great things.”

In 1993, Aliyev became president of newly independent Azerbaijan. And
with his backing, Talibov’s star continued to rise. In 1995, not long
after being elected to both the Azerbaijani and the local Nakhchivani
parliaments, he became chairman of the latter.

This position, to which he has regularly been “reelected” every five
years, makes him the republic’s absolute ruler, able to appoint
ministers, push laws through a pliant parliament, control the justice
system, and run the security agencies.

He has now ruled for nearly three decades, outlasting his original
patron, Heydar Aliyev, and now enjoying a similarly close relationship
with his son, Ilham, who succeeded him to the presidency.

The local media in Nakhchivan heaps praise on Talibov’s rule. “Today
is HIS day,” wrote the local news agency Nuhcixan on his 60th
birthday, describing him as “the great patriot, resolute, courageous,
as well as humanist,” but also “extremely humble.”

Internationally, the headlines are somewhat different, often focusing
on the draconian rules Talibov has imposed — like his instruction for
local citizens to read Hemingway, or his bans on hanging laundry on
balconies or civil servants wearing patterned tights. Foreign outlets
have also reported on his crackdowns on journalists and dissidents.

This has earned Nakhchivan a variety of nicknames: Opposition
activists call it the “North Korea of Azerbaijan,” while the Norwegian
Helsinki Committee described it as “Azerbaijan’s Dark Island.”

On visiting the territory, a U.S. diplomat wrote to his superiors in
Washington that the region was Talibov’s “fiefdom.”

“Nakhchivan is a world upside down,” the diplomat wrote.

The Talibovs’ Tight Grip

The Talibovs’ stranglehold on Nakhchivan is not just political. It is
widely assumed in Nakhchivan that the family dominates the local
economy, and experts have described them restricting imports, driving
competitors out of business, and even putting residents to work
harvesting their produce.

According to an exiled Nakhchivani, many products in the territory are
sold under the brand Gamigaya, a group of companies widely assumed to
belong to the family. The Gamigaya holding has also built or renovated
dozens of public facilities across Nakhchivan, including ministry
buildings, hospitals, universities, and a mosque.

Little documented proof of the Talibovs’ connection to this group of
companies — or to Cahan Holding, another omnipresent local
conglomerate — has ever emerged. In 2014, Rza Talibov described
himself on Facebook as Gamigaya’s chairman. But no company ownership
records are available to show who actually owns either conglomerate.

Instead, the Gamigaya and Cahan holdings are run by two businessmen
associated with the Talibovs named Vugar Abassov and Emin Uchar.

Abassov and Uchar partnered with Rza Talibov, his mother, and a cousin
in the only business in which they have ever been documented to be
shareholders: Nakhchivanbank, a local financial institution founded in
2008. The bank has since stopped disclosing its shareholders, leaving
it unclear whether the family is still involved, though Rza’s sister
Baharkhanim is a member of its supervisory board. If they are still
part owners of the institution, it is unclear how much they may be
earning.

The Laundromat Millions

But despite this lack of public records, leaked bank data from
Switzerland — part of the international Suisse Secrets investigation —
allowed reporters to document some of their wealth for the first time.
At their maximum in March 2011, the records show, Seymur’s Credit
Suisse account held $7.3 million, and Rza’s held $9.3 million.

The Suisse Secrets Investigation

Suisse Secrets is a collaborative journalism project based on leaked
bank account data from Swiss banking giant Credit Suisse.

The data was provided by an anonymous source to the German newspaper
Süddeutsche Zeitung, which shared it with OCCRP and 46 other media
partners around the world. Reporters on five continents combed through
thousands of bank records, interviewed insiders, regulators, and
criminal prosecutors, and dug into court records and financial
disclosures to corroborate their findings. The data covers over 18,000
accounts that were open from the 1940s until well into the last
decade. Together, they held funds worth more than $100 billion.

"I believe that Swiss banking secrecy laws are immoral,” the source of
the data said in a statement. “The pretext of protecting financial
privacy is merely a fig leaf covering the shameful role of Swiss banks
as collaborators of tax evaders. This situation enables corruption and
starves developing countries of much-needed tax revenue.”

Because the Credit Suisse data obtained by journalists is incomplete,
there are a number of important caveats to be kept in mind when
interpreting it. Read more about the project, where the data came
from, and what it means.

Because these figures only show the account balance at one point in
time, it’s impossible to know how much money passed through the
accounts over the years. But both brothers’ account numbers also
appear in two other leaks of banking data previously obtained by
OCCRP.

They show that, between 2007 and 2012, Rza and Seymur’s accounts at
Credit Suisse and several other banks received over a hundred separate
wire transfers worth a total of $20.5 million from two shell
companies, Murova Systems and Continus Corporation.

How much the Talibov children received from the Laundromat companies.

Both companies were identified as money laundering vehicles by Bosnian
prosecutors who looked into them as part of a human trafficking
investigation.

The leaked records from Credit Suisse also suggest an intriguing
connection to Cahan Holding: The powers of attorney on both Seymur and
Rza’s personal bank accounts were held by two Cahan employees.

These shell companies, which never did any substantive business, were
part of the Azerbaijani and Troika Laundromats, two massive money
laundering systems uncovered in previous OCCRP investigations.
Laundromats are essentially groups of connected shell companies that
send money around and around to each other, using many separate fake
transactions to obscure its origins.

“That’s incredibly unusual,” said Barrow, the financial crime
specialist who reviewed the transactions, explaining that they
contained multiple warning signs.

Most obviously, he said, was the origin of the money: shell companies
that registered no real business activity.

“Second problem, every single one of those payments is a round
figure,” Barrow said. “Business isn’t conducted that way. … Banks are
supposed to have monitoring in place that picks up on round figure
sums and flags them as suspicious.”

“And the other [suspicious] thing is when somebody is apparently doing
a massively wide variety of different businesses,” he said. “We saw
textiles and electronics going through the same company accounts. What
company does that? It makes no commercial sense whatsoever.”

For politically connected people, Barrow said, banks have a “legal
duty to do enhanced due diligence. Enhanced due diligence to establish
the source of wealth.”

But the money kept flowing, with the three Talibov children receiving
more and more until 2012, the last year that appears in the records.

An Inner Circle with Laundromat Access

Rza and Seymur Talibov weren’t the only members of the family to
receive money from the Laundromats. In 2012, an account held by their
sister, Baharkhanim Talibova, received $900,000 from Murova Systems
and another offshore shell company. Vasif Talibov’s nephew, Elnur
Talibov, received $77,000 from Murova Systems in his own Credit Suisse
account. The shell company also paid his tuition at College Du Leman,
an international boarding school in Geneva. And Vugar Abassov, the
Talibovs’ business partner, received $5.8 million from Murova and
Continus.

“Getting Acquainted” with Batumi

That January, Vasif Talibov paid a three-day visit to the seaside
Georgian resort city of Batumi, in the autonomous republic of Adjara.
According to the press office of the local government, his goal was to
“get acquainted with the economic and tourist[ic] potential of the
region.”

His elder son Rza, who accompanied him on the official trip, soon made
a personal real estate investment in the city, buying a historical
building just a few blocks from the beach for $1.5 million.

A few months later, Adjara representatives visited Nakhchivan and
signed a memorandum of economic cooperation between the two regions.

Afterwards, Rza wasted no time snapping up an adjacent 19th-century
building from the government through a special agreement with the
Adjara economic ministry. Though it was valued at over half a million
dollars, he was charged only a symbolic amount of sixty cents to
acquire it, in the interests of redevelopment. Rza also bought out
several people who already owned space in the building for another
$1.2 million.

He then merged the two buildings together to open a five-star hotel,
Divan Suites Batumi. According to an announcement by the city
administration, he would spend $10 million on its construction.

Rza also paid over $6 million to have a company owned by Emin Uchar,
who co-founded Nakhchivanbank with the family, build him an elite
villa in the city’s exclusive Green Cape neighborhood.

But the bulk of the family’s acquisitions were in Dubai.

By 2020, Vasif Talibov’s sons had acquired 11 properties in the
Emirate worth a total of at least $45 million today, including a
12-floor luxury hotel. According to a leak of real estate data
obtained by the non-profit research organization C4ADS, both brothers
held Emirati identification cards, indicating that they had residency
there.

None of these extravagant properties appear on the brothers’ social
media accounts. Unlike some other children of authoritarian rulers,
Seymur and Rza avoid displays of conspicuous wealth on their social
media pages, posting instead about their love for their country, their
father’s achievements, and their devotion to President Aliyev.

In one Twitter post last year, Rza shared a quote from Aliyev in large
block letters, apparently designed to underscore the regime’s
frugality.

“Our traditions, values, and lifestyle are our assets,” he wrote.

He didn’t mention the other ones.

https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.occrp.org/en/suisse-secrets/sons-of-azerbaijani-strongman-vasif-talibov-received-millions-from-money-laundering-systems__;!!LIr3w8kk_Xxm!5jLoq1KoCUAztpfuQXPba9I2AElsKSowU2uBkDb7apq2qppvGpHNRuLpTuKQOw$

[Yervant1]

BlankSpot, Sweden

Oct 10 2022

Data analysis shows a major victory for Azerbaijan’s digital army

Last week the Swedish news agency TT reported that Azerbaijan had discovered what it claimed to be mass graves from prior conflicts in the disputed Nagorno-Karabach region. At the time, TT was unaware that the social media campaign surrounding this news was well planned by the Azerbaijanis. Blankspot has analyzed how the Azerbaijani regime uses bots and troll factories to propagate sympathetic views towards the country.

Av RASMUS CANBÄCK 10 oktober, 2022

On October 5, the Swedish TT news agency put out an article that Azerbaijan had found mass graves in Nagorno-Karabakh. The story got republished in about fifteen major Swedish media outlets, among some of the largest in Sweden.

The article’s primary source was Hikmet Hajiyev, personal adviser on foreign affairs to Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, who wrote a tweet. The content of his tweet was shared over a short period on September 19 thousands of times on Twitter, both from Hajiyev’s account and others with similar content.

After criticism from many people, the Swedish-Armenian historian and peace and conflict researcher Vahagn Avedian about the factuality of the text and whether Hikmet Hajiyev is a credible source, concequnelty the appointed head of news for foreign affairs at TT, Pontus Ahlmqvist, regretted the mistake.

On Twitter, he wrote: ”We generally try to include context and caveats when we quote information from authoritarian regimes that we have not been able to verify ourselves. The Armenian information on war crimes could, for example, have been included here. We take the criticism to heart.”

The news came just days after top diplomats from several countries, including the US, France and Norway, condemned Azerbaijan for gross war crimes during the September 13-14 invasion of Armenia. There is no TT article about this.

The question of how a tweet from an authoritarian regime could go through TT’s fact-checking can say something about the Azerbaijani regime’s tactics on social media.

With the help of Twitter user @Bedig_A , who developed software that utilizes Twitter’s publicly available APIs, we provide insight into how the Azerbaijani regime’s propaganda operates on Twitter. The data Blankspot investigated the source of a tweet, the number of interactions, engagements and connections between different accounts. For example, whether one account interacts with another and at what times this happens.

In other words, the software can produce statistical analysis about different users’ behaviour on Twitter. Based on the data provided, we looked into different areas: 1) signs are showing how professional ”troll factories control the accounts”. 2) Signs that there are bots and 3) Indication of state-coordinated information campaigns.

This has been done by partly focusing on particular #hashtags with many apparent tweets in a short time intervals, accounts that tweet a lot without getting much interaction, and tweets from regime representatives that get rapid non-organic spread.

The analysis has been based on periods when there was war or conflict and just before and after. For example, when Azerbaijan attacked Armenia on September 13-14.

Chart shows top accounts that spread #NoPelosi (see text below)

Signs of troll factories

One purpose of troll factories is to make particular #hashtags and messages trend. One such example is #ArmenianVandalism, which was the main message on October 5 when TT picked up the news about mass graves.

Our analysis shows that the tag #ArmenianVandalism, which normally occurs about ten times a day, started to increase on September 27. This was the same day the EU condemned Azerbaijan for the war crimes. Activity then increased to approximately 300 occurrences per day and remained there until October 5, when it suddenly spiked to almost 2000 posts, only to sink to 300 again the following day.

The top accounts spreading this hashtag shared some characteristics: they had generic Azeri names, followed by numbers. They either had no profile picture or a profile picture of a young male person; some had the ruling party logo. Almost all had relatively few followers, but enough to not seem like a startup. Most were started between one and six months ago.

Between the hours of 16:50-17:37, #ArmenianVandalism increased through 261 individual accounts, with several of the accounts we looked at tweeting the message upwards of 20 times within the time span.

Soon after, it was picked up by the news agency TT.

Chart shows how #ArmenianVandalism hastag gained momentum on October 5th

Another example is the user @LiyevAqsin, who has occasionally been banned from Twitter. Since its creation during the Nagorno-Karabakh war in October 2020, the account has tweeted no less than 58,200 times. As a rule, the tweets are brief and exclusively praise the Azerbaijani regime.

Almost all tweets are posted between 09:00 in the morning and 18:00 local time, i.e. a normal working day by Baku standards.

On average, the account is spent on Twitter about four hours per day spread over 7 days a week, but the figure is higher if you start from working days when it is actually active.

The third example is the campaign against US Democratic Senator Bob Menendez, who, on September 28, presented a proposal to ban US money supporting the Azerbaijani defence.

During #CorruptPolitician, 7,246 likes and 22,504 tweets were generated from 1,514 accounts, of which 1,452 were unique. The average time between each tweet was 2 seconds. Several regime representatives attended.

A fourth example is the hashtag #NoPelosi, which was established on September 19 when US Congress Speaker Nancy Pelosi was on a state visit to Armenia. In connection with that, she made unusually strong statements against Azerbaijan as a result of the invasion a couple of days earlier.

The analysis shows that on September 18, #NoPelosi began to be used. Then it was tweeted 205 times with seven minutes between each tweet – on average. On September 19, it increased to 2,370 tweets, with 27 seconds between each tweet. One account, @Darya111991 tweeted #NoPelosi 519 times, which equates to an average of three tweets per minute on September 19 in the 24 hours.

Examples of the above accounts, back in June 2021, that appear to have abnormal patterns on Twitter. Some accounts have occasionally been suspended. Thus the green bar is sometimes shorter than the other two.

Signs of bots

The case with @Darya111991 shows signs of the use of bots.

Azerbaijani bots typically have generic usernames which often include many numbers. They tweet a lot and for a long time and their tweets are typically not elaborate in content – in other words, they do not appear unique.

Bots were involved in propagating both the #ArmenianVandalism and #NoPelosi hashtags, but they are generally used for a longer period of time.

One example, the user @NarnialsFree tweeted 24 hours a day for 170 days. For 510 days this account tweeted mainly during working hours. A total of 24,498 tweets.

There are many more examples. However, the intensity of tweeting increases when special messages are to be communicated in times of crisis and conflict.

The above map shows how these accounts have shared the same tweet about Cawa Media. It all started from Zaur Ahmadov’s account. This indicates that the tweet did not go organically but in a single trajectory through content Retweeting. A tweet is usually spread in several stages through shares.

Signs of coordinated information campaigns

In addition to the use of bots and troll factories, ‘real people’ with accounts are also needed to make a substantial impact. In the case of the TT article, it was Hikmet Hajiyev who was the source, but his is just one of many Azerbaijani accounts.

The information campaigns that have had the greatest impact are where bots, troll factories and accounts run by real people all cooperate, as was the case in #ArmenianVandalism, #CorruptPolitician and #NoPelosi.

On the other hand, there is coordinated cooperation without the other components as well. The dividing line between organic and artificial propagation in such cases is possibly not great.

One example of this is from December 2021 when the Azerbaijani Ambassador to Sweden, Zaur Ahmadov, (a known critic of Blankspot) tweeted a video by Cawa Media which – according to Azerbaijani rhetoric – showed Armenian war crimes in Nagorno-Karabakh. Only one day earlier, Blankspot had published an article about Cawa Media participating in an invitational trip to Azerbaijan which was followed up with an article about a seminar at an Azerbaijani propaganda conference in Brussels.

Zaur Ahmadov’s tweet received 130 shares and 227 likes. According to our analysis, 83 of these occurred within 58 seconds. Unlike the previous examples in the article, the vast majority of participating accounts here appear to be genuine, i.e. run by real people.

Example of an account supposedly run by a troll factory. It joined Twitter on 10-10-2020 and till today it tweeted 58,513 tweets

Among those who shared the video in those 58 seconds are Fuad Muradov (Azerbaijan’s Minister of Diaspora Affairs), a number of ambassadors, the PR manager of the state oil company SOCAR and several government employees in Baku.

What is striking is that all shares originated from Zaur Ahmadov’s account. Thus there were no retweets from those who had shared it. Normally, tweets are shared by one person sharing something which leads to a new follower sharing it further and so on.

It is therefore likely that the sharing of the tweet was planned through internal channels.

Since then, Cawa Media has frequently published articles about Azerbaijan, and despite there being a war between Armenia and Azerbaijan, the organization has also managed to be event photographers for the Armenian embassy in Stockholm.

The fact indicates that through well-planned coordination on social media, Azerbaijan can get away with its tactics without any criticism from the Swedish news outlets due to the lack of attention and interest the Caucasus region gets.

Ambassador Zaur Ahmadov used the article from TT as an indication that Swedish media are covering what is happening in Azerbaijan at all.

One reason for TT’s lack of source criticism by other newsrooms is that the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh is considered a peripheral part of Europe. It often falls outside the sphere of interest of the Western media.

Correction (2022-10-10, 21:17): One Twitter account was wrongly pointed out as an example of likely being a bot. The example is deleted.

Av RASMUS CANBÄCK

https://blankspot.se/data-analysis-shows-a-major-victory-for-azerbaijans-digital-army/

[Yervant1]

Oct 29 2022

Is Netflix Guilty of Whitewashing Human Rights?

Posted byMane Berikyan

A region whose presence in the Western media landscape has been close to nonexistent, the Caucasus rarely finds itself the subject of the U.S. entertainment industry. However, a rather unsettling surprise greets viewers upon viewing Netflix’s recent spy action film, The Gray Man, featuring A-list actors like Ryan Gosling, Chris Evans and Ana de Armas.

Azerbaijan, one of the least-free countries in the world whose human rights record can be considered deplorable at best, is featured prominently as the setting for a sizable portion of the plot. Released earlier this summer, the Netflix original follows the story of CIA agent “Sierra Six,” played by Ryan Gosling, who uncovers corrupt secrets about his superior and triggers a global manhunt after him.

Within the first thirty minutes of the film, the words “Baku, Azerbaijan” fill up the screen in bold silver letters against the backdrop of a shimmering Baku skyline. Several minutes later, the cameras pan over a large Azerbaijani flag, featured front and center in a military funeral alongside Azerbaijani soldiers, flags and — interestingly — a Russian Orthodox priest leading the service (Azerbaijan is a majority-Muslim country).

The scene, pun not intended, looks like it’s straight out a movie. Only, if the movie was an advertisement for oil-rich, dictatorial countries with something to hide.

Notably, the scenes set in Baku are not filmed in Azerbaijan, but in the Czech Republic. Azerbaijan’s unmistakable Flame Towers, the three skyscrapers that have come to symbolize its rather sudden climb to wealth, are added into the scenes set in Baku with computer-generated imagery (CGI).

The release of the film comes one year after Azerbaijan announced a partnership with Netflix, the world’s leading streaming platform.

The prominent incorporation of Baku as the setting for a sizable portion of the plot is particularly important when contextualized alongside Azerbaijan’s infamous black caviar diplomacy — source of the “biggest corruption scandal in the history of the Council of Europe,” according to the European Stability Initiative — and overarching human rights whitewashing strategy.

The film merely features the shimmering Baku skyline without bringing any known revenue to the country or creating local job opportunities, indicative of a broader whitewashing agenda at hand. One may argue it creates the impression of a paid promotion that Netflix loaned its ad space to.

The concept is even more troubling when considering Azerbaijan’s atrocious human rights record, which deteriorates every year. Azerbaijan not only continues to severely and violently repress its own citizens’ fundamental human rights, but as recently as 2020, it also launched an ethnic cleansing campaign against the civilian population of the autonomous Nagorno Karabakh region. Azerbaijan has since openly invaded neighboring Armenia, following Russia’s footsteps in its war against neighboring Ukraine.

It is therefore imperative that influential media companies do not give a platform to countries like Azerbaijan, as promotion in an implicitly positive light without additional context will directly benefit the brutal dictator in power and his clan. This will in turn fuel human rights violations and put vulnerable people further at risk.

Regarding the cooperation with Netflix, perhaps foreshadowing this turn of events, Azerbaijani Culture Minister Anar Karimov expressed last year his intentions to “fully demonstrate the film potential of Azerbaijan to the world,” emphasizing the importance of Russia, a close partner of Azerbaijan, in this process, as well. It appears Azerbaijani investments in soft power are now materializing.

Despite being one of the most expensive films Netflix has produced, The Gray Man has not fared well with critics and audiences. However, it now retains the ranking of #1 Netflix film of the year and #4 of all time.

Meanwhile, other countries in the region have also made significant headway in Hollywood. For instance, the 2021 film Fast and Furious 9 was filmed, in part, on the streets of Tbilisi, Georgia, generating buzz in the country and receiving praise from Georgian authorities, who took credit for the development. The project generated nearly $10 million for the country and created hundreds of local jobs.

Unlike its two South Caucasus neighbors, Armenia has yet to make such progress in the international film industry.

For instance, the 2016 film The Promise, a story about the Armenian Genocide, was temporarily available on Netflix and was celebrated by Armenian communities worldwide. However, an influx of negative reviews, allegedly orchestrated by genocide deniers, immediately tanked the film’s ratings.

Looking forward, while each country pursues its own spotlight on the international media stage, Azerbaijan continues seeking new avenues to consolidate dictatorial power in the Aliyev clan’s bloody hands and whitewash its human rights record internationally.

When human rights concerns arise, however, it is up to media companies and the agency of their consumers to act responsibly and consciously in light of the global implications they perpetrate.

https://www.glimpsefromtheglobe.com/features/op-ed/is-netflix-guilty-of-whitewashing-human-rights/

[Yervant1]

Asbarez.com

With Section 907 Waiver Azerbaijan Made Hundreds of Millions in U.S. Contracts, While U.S. Generals Profited from Baku

by Asbarez Staff

December 5, 2022

in Armenia, Artsakh, Featured Main, Latest, News, Top Stories

The Washington Post’s lead online story on Dec. 5 about how Baku profited from U.S. contracts during the Afghanistan war

As a result of the waiver of Section 907 by successive administrations, Azerbaijan made hundreds of millions of dollars in United States and NATO contracts, using the Caspian country as a route for delivery of goods to Afghanistan during the height of the war. At the same time, retired U.S. generals and other personnel profited from Baku after their tours of duty ended in the U.S.-NATO schemes.

Beginning with George W. Bush Administration, which started the war in Afghanistan, all other administrations—Obama, Trump and currently Biden—have waived Section 907, which calls for restrictions on U.S. aid to Azerbaijan, and entered into military agreements with Aliyev’s murderous regime.

This is the subject of an extensive expose published on Monday as its lead online story by The Washington Post, which details the trail of money flowing into Azerbaijan’s controversial Silk Way Airlines—and its parent the Silk Way Group—as well as how two retired U.S. Air Force general sought to cash in on their involvement from Baku, and Silk Way, which attempted to hire them as consultants after they left the U.S. military. The Washington Post also details how it sued, under the Freedom of Information Act, to obtain classified records showing the Air Force Review Boards Agency attempts to block one of the general’s contracts, due to conflicts with U.S. national security interests.

In the Post piece, entitled “Fearing Scandal, Air Force Blocked Generals’ Foreign Consulting Deals,” reporters Craig Whitlock and Nate Jones outline how despite concerns from the CIA and State Department about Azerbaijan’s authoritarian and corrupt practices, the U.S. military leaders looked to Azerbaijan and embraced its president Ilham Aliyev at the height of the war in Afghanistan.

“Setting aside concerns about Azerbaijan’s culture of corruption, Pentagon officials persuaded Aliyev to open his country’s borders and airspace to critical U.S. and NATO supply routes to Afghanistan. In exchange, U.S. officials promised a closer diplomatic partnership with Aliyev and steered $369 million in defense contracts to Silk Way Airlines, an Azerbaijan cargo carrier that U.S. investigators say was controlled by the government,” the Post reported.

“Two U.S. Air Force generals — Duncan McNabb and William Fraser III — who oversaw the supply routes from 2008 to 2014 later tried to cash in on their Azerbaijan connections. Upon retiring from active duty, the four-star generals negotiated valuable consulting deals with Silk Way Airlines, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post under the Freedom of Information Act. One of them stood to earn $5,000 a day,” added the Post.

According to The Washington Post, when the collaboration between the U.S. and Azerbaijan began, Baku wanted to charge the U.S. tariff, which the Pentagon refused.

“The supply routes paid off for Azerbaijan in other ways, however. Silk Way Airlines, seeking to break into the U.S. market, received $269 million in U.S. defense contracts during McNabb’s three-year tenure at Transcom to transfer supplies from Europe to Afghanistan and Iraq, according to Air Force records,” the Post reported.

McNabb and Fraser, in successive terms, were in charge of the U.S. Transportation Command, known as Transcom from 2008 to 2014. As heads of Transcom, they oversaw what the Post reported as being 25 percent of American transport of non-lethal material to Afghanistan through Azerbaijan.

While, according to the Post, McNabb did not apply for government approval when he signed a $10,000 monthly consulting contract with Silk Way, Fraser, when seeking to sign a contract that would have paid him a reported $5,000 daily salary, sought U.S. clearance, which raised alarms and red flags at the Pentagon and the State Department, which voiced their concerns to the Air Force agency about Silk Way’s ties to the Aliyev regime.

After Fraser did not receive approval for his contract, in a memo to the Air Force agency, he made remarks that were perceived as warnings, according to the Post.

“The general said he believed there would be ‘blowback for the United States’ if the Air Force didn’t let him work for Silk Way,” according to Fraser’s memo.

Read the entire article by The Washington Post.

https://asbarez.com/with-section-907-waiver-azerbaijan-made-hundreds-of-millions-in-u-s-contracts-while-u-s-generals-profited-from-baku/?fbclid=IwAR3OXE46bHsm8MVL525-sJBfeRgwPl_pZy5cSkI8BeL1-hPISp-kidhysjA

[Yervant1]

When Azerbaijan Opens Wide its Purse,

Money-Grabbers Rush to Take Their Share

By Harut Sassounian

Publisher, The California Courier

www.TheCaliforniaCourier.com

 

Journalist Till Bruckner wrote a lengthy investigative article regarding Azerbaijan handing some of its vast petrodollars to politicians, businessmen, and universities around the world. Even prominent individuals and institutions prostitute themselves when a huge amount of money is thrown at them. Bruckner’s article, “Corruptistan Azerbaijan: How to Build Yourself a Stealth Lobbyist, Azerbaijani style,” was posted on the website of “Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project.”

The article states: “The rise of Brenda Shaffer, a scholar and oft-quoted expert in the field of energy politics illustrates just how vulnerable the American foreign policy establishment is to manipulation by foreign agents. Supported by an overseas regime and an assorted network of overt and undercover lobbyists, she used oil money to build her academic credentials, then in turn used those credentials to promote Azerbaijan’s agendas through Congressional testimony, dozens of newspaper op-eds and media appearances, countless think tank events, and even scholarly publications. She’s still doing it.”

When testifying before the House of Representatives’ Committee on International Relations in 2001, Shaffer was introduced as “the director of the Caspian Studies Program and a post-doctoral fellow in the international security program at the Belfort [belfer] Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.”

In her remarks, Shaffer asked Congress to repeal Section 907 of the Freedom Support Act that barred direct US aid to the government of Azerbaijan. Members of Congress did not know that “the Caspian Studies Program she headed at Harvard was set up in 1999 through a $1 million grant from the US Azerbaijan Chamber of Commerce and a consortium of oil and gas companies led by Exxon, Mobil, and Chevron, all of which had commercial interests in the region. The chamber of commerce is a pro-Azerbaijan pressure group whose Board of Directors includes a vice president of SOCAR, the Azerbaijan state-owned energy company, and top lobbyists for BP and Chevron.”

The chamber issued a press release in 1999, stating that the Caspian Studies Program’s aim was to “help shape informed policy,” regarding Azerbaijan. The Kennedy School of Government, in its own press release, announced that Graham T. Allison, Director of Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, and Pres. Ilham Aliyev, then first vice president of Azerbaijan’s oil company, SOCAR, would speak at its inaugural conference.

In 2000, then-President Heydar Aliyev attended an Azerbaijan Chamber of Commerce event, telling the guests: “I cheer the opening of a new chair at Harvard University relating to Azerbaijan and [the] Caspian area. I am thankful for the assistance of American-Azerbaijan Chamber of Commerce rendered for it.” Allison, a former Assistant Secretary of Defense and Dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School, was removed from the chamber’s Board of Trustees after OCCRP pointed out his name.

OCCRP repeatedly asked the chamber for a copy of its financial statements, however, the chamber did not provide them, which is illegal.

The chamber listed such prominent individuals as “Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, James A. Baker III, Brent Scowcroft and John Sununu” as members of its “Honorary Council of Advisors.”

Shaffer “led the Caspian Studies Program until 2005. During her tenure, she wrote 14 op-eds for leading U.S. and Israeli newspapers including the International Herald Tribune and the Jerusalem Post. Most called on American policy makers to pay more attention to the region. One exhorted the United States to stop funding for the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh.” In May 2006, journalist and lobbying expert Ken Silverstein wrote an article titled, “Academics for Hire,” in Harper’s Magazine, accusing prominent academics of performing “intellectual acrobatics on behalf of the [Caspian] region’s rulers.” He singled out Shaffer for especially harsh criticism.

Silverstein accused Harvard’s Caspian Studies Program of lacking “intellectual integrity,” highlighting its connection with Azerbaijan Chamber of Commerce and specifically pointed out “Shaffer’s 2001 plea to Congress to repeal sanctions against Azerbaijan.”

Silverstein cautioned in his article: “Caspian watchers beware: the next time you see or hear an ‘independent’ American expert talking about how the region’s rulers are implementing bold reforms, check the expert’s credentials to see just how independent he or she truly is.”

Bruckner wrote: The following month, “the International Herald Tribune ran its third Shaffer op-ed, about ethnic Azerbaijanis and other minorities in Iran.” Since then, Silverstein outed her as an “academic for hire whose career was fueled by Azerbaijani lobbying outfits and Western oil companies invested in Azerbaijan.”

Bruckner complained to the editors of the New York Times, Washington Post, Reuters, Bloomberg, Foreign Affairs Journal, and Wall Street Journal for publishing Shaffer’s op-ed articles without disclosing her connections to Azerbaijan.

Shaffer also frequently participated in think tank panel discussions. Two days after Azerbaijan’s 2013 fraudulent presidential election, Shaffer spoke at Carnegie Endowment for International Affairs, praising the repressive country’s “vibrant press,” its fierce political debates, and its “realistic” voters!

“During December 2014 alone, Shaffer appeared on TV screens via Fox Business and Al Jazeera America, and commented on energy issues in print via the Jerusalem Post, London Times, The Australian, NPR, and Foreign Policy magazine. (Only weeks earlier, Foreign Policy itself had run a piece on Azerbaijan’s lobbying efforts by a different author that mentioned Shaffer’s SOCAR connection),” wrote Bruckner.

It is shameful that think tanks, universities, and politicians eagerly take the money offered to them by Azerbaijan, thereby encouraging the repressive regime to continue giving large sums to cover up its human rights violations.