A £14 million house in Knightsbridge and a golf club in Ascot have been forfeited to the British State by the wife of jailed banker Jahangir Hajiyev. The National Crime Agency has said there was ‘no reasonable explanation’ for the purchase of either of the properties, after subjecting them to the first-ever unexplained wealth orders (UWOs) granted in the UK. The NCA believes it is likely the properties were paid for using large-scale fraud and embezzlement, false accounting and money laundering.
Zamira Hajiyeva has now agreed to give the properties up, after a six-year-long investigation by the NCA. Her husband, Jahangir Haiyev, who was Chairman of the Board of the International Bank of Azerbaijan from 2001 to 2015, is currently serving a 16-year jail sentence for charges including fraud and embezzlement, in Baku, Azerbaijan. “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,” said Tim Quarrelle, Branch Commander for Asset Denial at the NCA.
READ MORE: Shakespeare's Globe evacuated after 'red flare' lands in crowd “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.” The NCA applied for a freezing order in .