A banker’s wife targeted under “McMafia laws” after splashing out £16 million at Harrods has been given back her multi-million pound jewellery collection by law enforcers despite having to surrender her Knightsbridge home and a golf club on the grounds that they were bought with the proceeds of crime.
The National Crime Agency had argued in court for years that Zamira Hajiyeva’s jewellery collection – which includes a £1.2 million Cartier ring and further pieces worth six figure sums – and two properties were acquired with money plundered by her husband Jahangir from his bank in Azerbaijan.
The agency’s argument about the properties was accepted by the High Court last month in an order requiring Mrs Hajiyeva to forfeit 70 per cent of the value of her £14 million home on Walton Street in Knightsbridge and the same proportion from the future sale of the Mill Ride Golf club in Berkshire.
The court order ruled that the two properties had been purchased as the result of criminal activity without making any finding about whether Mrs Hajiyeva – who had denied wrongdoing throughout – had any knowledge of the illicit source of her husband’s wealth.
But although the NCA described that outcome as a “fantastic” success and the result of “tireless” work by its investigators in tracing the illicit money movements behind the property purchases, it has quietly abandoned its attempt to secure the forfeiture of Mrs Hajiyeva’s jewels in separate legal proceedings at Westminster Magistrates’ Court.
Those proceedings had been due to resume this month but have now been terminated by “mutual consent” in an unpublicised deal that was not mentioned in the NCA press release announcing the property forfeitures.
The decision means that Mrs Hajiyeva, who is expected to receive at least £4.2 million as her 30 per cent share from the sale of her Walton Street home and millions more when her golf club, which was bought for £10.7 million in 2013, is sold, will walk away from the court action with assets, including her jewels, that could potentially be worth as much as £10 million or more.
The NCA’s decision to abandon its fight to obtain the jewels is understood to have been prompted by a desire to free its investigators and resources to focus on other targets, while also allowing it to reach a settlement that has resulted in the recovery of many millions of pounds from Mrs Hajiyeva, who in 2018 became the first person in Britain to be given an Unexplained Wealth Order under legislation dubbed “McMafia laws” after the hit BBC TV series on corrupt oligarchs in London.
But anti-corruption campaigners expressed concern about the large amount of money being retained by Mrs Hajiyeva and warned that the risk of incurring high legal costs by continuing with the proceedings, in which the NCA was facing allegations of disclosure failures, was likely to have been a key factor.
Susan Hawley, the executive director of Spotlight against Corruption, added that the case illustrated the challenge of trying to seize alleged illicit assets from wealthy targets able to fund expensive court battles and called for government reforms to protect law enforcers from excessive cost orders against them by the courts.
“While it was welcome that the NCA finally managed to seize properties as a result of its first McMafia order, the fact that Mrs Hajiyeva can keep such a substantial part of this suspicious and still unexplained wealth will stick in the craw of many - not least the ordinary people of Azerbaijan from whom the funds were stolen,” she said.
“The UK’s current costs regime for seizing dirty money prevents law enforcement bodies from acting as speedily and as boldly as they need to if the UK is really to tackle its dirty money problem. The new government needs to prioritise greater costs protection for agencies like the NCA so that they have the confidence to seize properties linked to dirty money far more frequently and to go after far more ambitious sums of dirty money. “
As well as her £1.2 million Cartier ring, other jewels handed back to Mrs Hajiyeva by the NCA include a “Boucheron sapphire and ruby serpent pendant “danger necklace” bought for a VAT exempt price of £863,478 and a Van Cleef and Arpels “cultured pearl necklace with diamond clasp” bought in 2008 in Swiss francs for the equivalent at the time of £310,431.
A “Boucheron emerald cabochon and diamond ring” that was bought for £125,000 free of VAT, a pair of Tiffany and Co “yellow diamond earrings” costing £52,000 and a Cartier “onyx bead and diamond bracelet” valued at £49,200 in 2010, have also been returned to Mrs Hajiyeva.
So too have a Boucheron “sapphire and diamond Sheherazade ring” that cost a VAT exempt £13,404 and a £27,591 Boucheron “sapphire and emerald ring”, along with several more pieces of unidentified value.
They were described during the now abandoned forfeiture proceedings as including a “Chopard yellow gold happy diamond pendant”, a “diamond cluster ring”, a “diamond bracelet”, a “Carrera Y Carrera diamond sunburst pendant and earrings”, and “Leo Pizzo sapphire and diamond flower earrings and pendant”.
The legal battle over Mrs Hajiyeva’s jewels began more than four years ago in January 2020 when an application to forfeit her 49 piece collection was made by the NCA at Westminster Magistrates’ Court.
The proceedings had been bogged down with torturous legal wrangling ever since with lengthy arguments first over whether Mr Hajiyev – who is in prison in Baku serving a 16.5 year sentence for stealing vast sums from the International Bank of Azerbaijan while chairman – had been served with papers relating to the hearing and then whether he was able to instruct lawyers to represent him in the case.
Allegations by Mrs Hajiyeva’s lawyers of disclosure failings by the NCA and breaches of the agency’s duty of candour – which had yet to be determined when the proceedings were halted – created further delay and risking adding to the already heavy costs incurred by law enforcers in fighting the case.
It had already been forced to send staff to Azerbaijan to try to break the logjam over Mr Hajiyev’s participation as an “interested party” in the proceedings and use the assistance of British diplomats in trying to persuade the authorities in Baku to allow Mr Hajiyev access to lawyers.
The NCA’s efforts to seize Mrs Hajiyeva’s home on Walton Street and the Mill Ride golf club in separate High Court proceedings after the judge in the case, Mr Justice Freedman, accepted the agency’s case that Mr Hajiyev had no “proprietary right” over either property.
The ruling meant the jailed banker was not classed as an “interested party” in the litigation and reduced the potential for the type of extensive legal wrangling over his ability to participate in tbe case that caused such delay in the jewellery proceedings.
After obtaining the High Court order giving it the right to sell the Walton Street home and the golf club and retain 70 per cent of the properties, the NCA said the assets had been “ obtained as a direct result of large-scale fraud and embezzlement, false accounting and money laundering” carried out by Mrs Hajiyeva’s husband with the help of an associate.
It added: “Substantial sums were moved through a network of accounts and companies in a host of different jurisdictions – including the British Virgin Islands, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Panama, Cyprus and Luxembourg – and channelled into luxury assets for the [Hajiyev] family.”
Mrs Hajiyeva’s lawyers said in a statement that the High Court settlement over her Walton Street home and golf club contained “no finding of fact by the Court about our client’s knowledge or state of mind, still less involvement, in relation to these properties.”
They added that Mrs Hajiyeva had decided “to settle the proceedings because it proved impossible to defend them” when her husband was in jail amd that she and her family were “happy to now be able to move on with their lives.”
