A jailed banker’s wife, who once spent £600,000 at Harrods in a single day, has agreed to forfeit a £14 million house in Knightsbridge and a golf club in Ascot. Zamira Hajiyeva, who splurged £16 million at the luxury department store over the course of a decade, handed over the properties following a six-year investigation by the National Crime Agency. The NCA said they were obtained as a ‘direct result of large-scale fraud and embezzlement, false accounting and money laundering’, with ‘no reasonable explanation’ provided for the source of funds used to purchase either one.
Mrs Hajiyeva’s husband, Jahangir Hajiyev, was the chairman of the state-controlled International Bank of Azerbaijan (IBA) from 2001 until his resignation in 2015, and is currently serving a 16-year jail sentence in Baku for fraud and embezzlement among other offences. Mrs Hajiyeva was the first person made subject to an unexplained wealth order (UWO), a power brought into force in January 2018 under so-called McMafia laws – named after the BBC organised crime drama and the book which inspired it. The NCA applied for a property freezing order over the two properties in March 2021 and a claim for civil recovery at the High Court in June 2023.
On August 1, the civil recovery order was granted, resulting in the forfeiture of 70% of the value of both properties. The High Court concluded the properties were purchased as a result of criminal activity and are therefore recoverable, but has not mad.