A jailed banker’s wife, who spent more than £16 million on shopping trips to Harrods, has forfeited her London Knightsbridge home and a golf club in Ascot. 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.