The wife of a jailed banker has forfeited her London Knightsbridge home and a golf club in Ascot after spending more than £16 million on shopping trips to Harrods.
Zamira Hajiyeva, 61 whose husband Jahangir Hajiyev, 62, is serving a 16-year jail sentence in Baku for fraud and embezzlement, had been pursued by the National Crime Agency (NCA) over the source of her considerable fortune.
The NCA said it believed her assets were obtained as a “direct result of large-scale fraud and embezzlement, false accounting and money laundering” and in 2018 she became the subject of Britain’s first unexplained wealth order (UWO).
Officials applied for a property freezing order in relation to her Knightsbridge home as well as Mill Ride golf and country club in Ascot which she bought for £10.5 million.
The High Court concluded the properties had been purchased as a result of criminal activity and were therefore recoverable.
No finding was made in relation to Mrs Hajiyeva’s knowledge of how the properties were paid for.
Jahangir Hajiyev is the former chairman of the state-owned International Bank of Azerbaijan and was convicted in 2016 of defrauding the bank out of £2.2 billion.
His official salary between 2001 and 2008 was £54,000 a year, but he was later estimated to be worth £55 million.
During a court hearing after the initial UWO was issued, details of Mrs Hajiyeva’s lavish spending habits were laid bare, including that she had spent £16.3 million at Harrods between 2006 and 2016.
NCA investigators claimed she had used 35 different credit cards issued by her husband’s bank to fund shopping sprees and on one occasion had spent £150,000 on jewellery.
Mrs Hajiyeva also owned a £35 million private jet and had a wine cellar stocked with some of the world’s most expensive vintages.
Tim Quarrelle, branch commander for asset denial at the NCA, said: “NCA officers worked tirelessly to track the complex movement of these funds across the international banking system, through shell companies in multiple jurisdictions, in order to ascertain their source.
“This result comes almost six-and-a-half years after we served Mrs Hajiyeva with the first unexplained wealth order ever granted, and highlights our commitment to using all the tools at our disposal to combat the flow of illicit money into, and through, the UK.”
Simon Armstrong, deputy director at NCA Legal, said: “The NCA’s investigation was followed by complex and lengthy litigation, which saw lawyers address numerous challenges and use legal powers introduced by the Criminal Finances Act 2017 to successfully recover assets worth millions of pounds.
“This fantastic result demonstrates how the NCA will deploy all the powers available to identify, pursue and recover the proceeds of crime.”
