Taxpayers in Azerbaijan lost more than US$ 600 million in a deal that made no sense for all involved except for a murky offshore deeply connected to President Ilham Aliyev.
An investigative report provides details on how a company close to Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and his family likely walked off with more than US$ 1 billion in a takeover of his country’s stake in Azercell Telecom, the largest mobile operator in the country.
The process was aided by a subsidiary of TeliaSonera, the Swedish-Finnish telecom giant, which acted against its own interest to allow the deal to happen.
The report is the result of a months-long joint investigation by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, Swedish public television SVT and the Swedish news agency TT.