Another Scots agency linked to £2bn Azeri slush fund
MORE than £53 million of mystery money has been laundered from oil-rich Azerbaijan through a shell firm based at one of Scotland’s longest-established company formation agencies, investigators claim.
The business was one of 20 Scottish limited partnerships (SLPs) named in an investigation into the elaborate and far-reaching £2.2 billion Azerbaijan Laundromat money-laundering scheme.
The firm, called Rasmus, received some $70m in payments fed through the Laundromat, according to an international journalistic investigation sending shock waves through Europe.
It took receipt of the cash, nominally for equipment deliveries, in the course of just 18 months while registered at the Edinburgh base of Jordans Scotland, a specialist corporate law services firm that can trace its roots back to Victorian times.
There is no suggestion Jordans Scotland, which was rebranded from its historic name Oswalds in 2014, had any knowledge of Rasmus’s activities or links to the former Soviet republic.
There is growing concern those close to the authoritarian regime of Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev used the Laundromat as a slush fund to pay off western politicians.
The government of Azerbaijan has dismissed the allegations as a “scandalous” smear campaign orchestrated by enemies, including in the neighbouring country of Armenia.
The two countries have a troubled relationship, particularly over the disputed area of Nagorno-Karabakh, which has led to clashes in the past.
However, Duncan Hames, of Transparency International, stressed real people suffered from laundering of this kind.
He said: “Knowing UK-registered companies were at the heart of a scheme that saw $2.9bn stolen from Azerbaijan underlines just how damaging it is to be complicit in global corruption.”
The Rasmus payments – and $2bn more – were revealed as a journalist group called the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) published 16,000 bank transactions previously leaked to the Danish newspaper Berlingske.
The historic data dump has already exposed that two SLPs, Glasgow-based Hilux Services and Polux Management, and two English firms made up a core that distributed the cash from Azerbaijan.
Raw data analysed by The Herald shows 83 transactions from the two core firms to Rasmus between June 2013 and December 2014.
It cannot be assumed, warn OCCRP, that all transactions in the Laundromat are suspicious.
Rasmus has never filed any accounts and has never revealed its true owners. The now dissolved SLP was formally held by two firms registered in the British Virgin Islands.
Rasmus was wound up in April 2016, more than a year before the UK Government imposed emergency transparency rules on SLPs after a series of revelations by The Herald around their abuse by criminals, especially in the former Soviet Union.
The Herald reported yesterday most of the 20 SLPs in the Azerbaijan Laundromat were registered at addresses that have featured in previous scandals, including the10-times-bigger Russian Laundromat exposed earlier this year. These included a number of private homes and mailbox and virtual offices in Glasgow and Edinburgh.
Rasmus itself was initially registered at a small private home in Bishopbriggs, near Glasgow. It moved to Oswalds, now Jordans Scotland, in June 2013 shortly after the first payments from the Laundromat were made.
The Herald asked Jordans to comment but we have received no response.
The agency’s Edinburgh division is led by director Andrew Cockburn. Mr Cockburn is an active member of the Institute of Directors and past president of the Edinburgh City Business Club.
Jordans Scotland’s sister firm Jordan Trust Company offers UK and offshore company registrations, including in Russian, to an international market.
Last week it emerged Edinburgh accountants Saffery Champness, who also have an offshore business aimed at former USSR clients, hosted an SLP at the centre of an investigation in to an alleged £40m VAT fraud in Russia. A man has been jailed.