THE REAL MYSTERY ABOUT THAT £16m HARRODS BILL

EVERY time Zamira Hajiyeva walked through the doors of Harrods — which she did, rather a lot — the emporium’s owners must have cracked open another bottle of Grand Cru champagne.

For we learned last week that this Azerbaijhani woman had, over a decade, spent £16 million at the London department store. We learned it because her expenditures had been itemised as part of an Unexplained Wealth Order issued by the High Court. This is a new criminal procedure designed to track down ‘dirty money’ from foreign plutocrats, many of whom have bought mansions in Central London.

Actually, the source of Mrs Hajiyeva’s prodigious spending power is not exactly inexplicable. Her husband was the chairman of the International Bank of Azerbaijan and was convicted there, in 2016, of fraud and embezzlement.

According to the Reuters financial news agency, he is thought to have misappropriated no less than $3 billion.

No, what I thought did need explaining was the breakdown of her Harrods expenditure, presumably supplied by the store itself.

For example, it declares that she spent £ 32,000 on chocolates. Now, I know that these would not have been Cadbury’s: all the same, how is that even possible?

On the other hand, the cost of her visit to the Harrods fromagerie was given as £2.18. In Harrods’s food hall, that would barely pay for a tiny cube of cheddar on the end of a cocktail stick.

Most puzzlingly of all, there is an itemised expenditure of 70p in the store’s designer watch department.

You’d think it was Poundland, not the most expensive room in the Knightsbridge store where the bored wives of Russian oligarchs use their credit cards to take revenge upon their husbands.

This doesn’t add up.