In 2019, OCCRP reporters start­ed look­ing into the theft in Spain of a lux­u­ry watch owned by Rashad Abdullayev, the son of the for­mer head of Azerbaijan’s noto­ri­ous­ly cor­rupt state oil company.

That inci­dent even­tu­al­ly led to the dis­cov­ery that Rashad secret­ly owned a $22-mil­lion flat in London.

Recent U.K. leg­is­la­tion made the rev­e­la­tion pos­si­ble — with a lit­tle help from OCCRP’s data team.

U.K. prop­er­ties are often owned through com­pa­nies set up in tax havens that anonymize cor­po­rate own­er­ship, open­ing a neat loop­hole that has allowed peo­ple to hide their tracks — and ownership.

But in 2022, the U.K. cre­at­ed a reg­istry requir­ing off­shore firms to declare that they own prop­er­ty in the country.

“New trans­paren­cy rules are start­ing to unveil how the world’s polit­i­cal lead­ers, includ­ing those from coun­tries with seri­ous gov­er­nance issues, own vast amounts of U.K. real estate via once secre­tive off­shore com­pa­nies,” Julie Swann, of Transparency International U.K., pre­vi­ous­ly told OCCRP reporters.

There’s just one prob­lem: Members of the pub­lic can only search the reg­istry by com­pa­ny name — not by the name of the per­son behind the company.

That’s where OCCRP’s data desk came in.

Dataset Remix

Our team took advan­tage of a lit­tle-known func­tion on the reg­istry, which allows a user to down­load the entire “over­seas enti­ty” dataset and search for own­ers from spe­cif­ic juris­dic­tions. This infor­ma­tion was uploaded into Aleph, OCCRP’s data plat­form, to cross-ref­er­ence with oth­er datasets.

And while the U.K.’s reg­istry does not allow a jour­nal­ist to search the data by owner’s name, Aleph does.

But anoth­er prob­lem then arose for jour­nal­ists — appear­ing in the U.K. over­seas enti­ty data means that enti­ty owns prop­er­ty in the U.K., but it doesn’t tell you which prop­er­ty it owns.

So, the team scraped data from anoth­er source — the British land reg­istry of over­seas com­pa­nies own­ing prop­er­ty in England and Wales. Combined, these two datasets allow jour­nal­ists to see both the ben­e­fi­cial own­er of a for­eign com­pa­ny that holds prop­er­ty, and where the real estate is located.

Which brings us back to the ultra-pricey Richard Mille watch — one of just 75 such pieces in exis­tence — which was stolen in Ibiza in 2019.

Azerbaijani media had been report­ing that the watch belonged to Rashad, but there was no con­fir­ma­tion until OCCRP man­aged to obtain a police report from Ibiza, which named him.

OCCRP pub­lished a sto­ry iden­ti­fy­ing Rashad as the watch’s own­er, and not­ing that he was the son of Rovnag Abdullayev, then pres­i­dent of the state-run ener­gy giant SOCAR.

Journalists had long inves­ti­gat­ed alleged cor­rup­tion with­in SOCAR, such as efforts by two of the company’s sub­sidiaries to siphon $1.7 bil­lion from a major gas project, and on appar­ent plots to enrich insid­ers, includ­ing Rovnag Abdullayev’s father-in-law.

But until the stolen watch inci­dent, they hadn’t thought to look into Rovnag’s son, said OCCRP jour­nal­ist Kelly Bloss.

“It was a hint that this guy has a lot of mon­ey,” she said.

Bloss had been work­ing along­side Transparency International U.K. to track assets owned in Britain by polit­i­cal­ly exposed per­sons from Azerbaijan.

They plugged Rashad’s name into the data, and there he was: the own­er of a flat in one of London’s most expen­sive areas, at the age of just 28.

Rashad had acquired the prop­er­ty through a com­pa­ny reg­is­tered in Guernsey, a British depen­den­cy in the Channel Islands that is famous for its cor­po­rate secrecy.

OCCRP pub­lished an inves­ti­ga­tion reveal­ing this in January 2023, the year after Rashad’s father was removed from his posi­tion as head of SOCAR.

It was a major break­through, said Bloss.

“We found Abdullayev fam­i­ly prop­er­ty out­side Azerbaijan for the first time,” she said. “We knew they were rich, but we didn’t know where they were hid­ing their property.”

Rashad’s father, Rovnag, told OCCRP at the time that he had made no pay­ments in rela­tion to his son’s apart­ment, and knew noth­ing about the ori­gins of the mon­ey used to buy it.

Rashad did not reply to ques­tions from OCCRP, but pub­lic infor­ma­tion shows he worked for a SOCAR-affil­i­at­ed com­pa­ny when he was 16 years old. Three years lat­er he found­ed a real estate com­pa­ny in Turkey, where he also owned a restau­rant. And he co-owned a chain of gas sta­tions in neigh­bor­ing Georgia.

While mys­ter­ies remain about how Rashad got the mon­ey to buy the London flat, the dis­cov­ery of the prop­er­ty did high­light his well-con­nect­ed family’s wealth.

Another recent­ly pub­lished sto­ry also used the dataset to dis­cov­er pre­vi­ous­ly unre­port­ed prop­er­ties belong­ing to the fam­i­ly of Armenia’s ex-president.

And the report­ing couldn’t have been done with­out the U.K.’s efforts to improve trans­paren­cy in its real estate sec­tor — how­ev­er flawed they may be.

Transparency International’s U.K. chap­ter is urg­ing the gov­ern­ment to close “loop­holes” in the reg­istry, includ­ing by “pre­vent­ing peo­ple from sub­mit­ting mis­lead­ing infor­ma­tion with­out consequence.”

“While the new reg­is­ter is prov­ing its worth, it is far too easy to evade and avoid the new rules,” said Swann.

Original arti­cle source: OCCRP

The OCCRP Team

Published in

OCCRP: Unreported

Feb 8, 2024