Contagion threat from Baku billions pouring through companies

BAKU has always felt like the crossroads of Europe and Asia, a city, rather like Istanbul in Turkey, that somehow bridges two worlds.

Ultra-modern glass and steel skyscrapers now punctuate the skyline of the Azerbaijan’s ancient capital, thanks to its second great oil boom in just a century.

The new buildings – five-star hotels and glitzy malls – represent the regime of Ilham Aliyev just as ostentatious Communist buildings did for his father, Heydar, Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev’s strongman in the Caucasus.

Aliyev senior, a former KGB man, ran Azerbaijan for most of 1969 to 2003. He was only out of power for six after Pravda, the paper of the Communist party, accused him of corruption.

His son has had a similarly bad press, thought not usually at home, for the same reasons.

Mr Aliyev – his name is sometimes transcribed in to English as Aliev – was named as “Corrupt Person of the Year” by Transparency International in 2013. Reporters without Borders, the freedom of speech group, this year ranked his country as one of the worst in its world press freedom index.

It said: “Discontent with crushing all forms of pluralism, President Aliyev has been waging a relentless war against his remaining critics since 2014.

“Independent journalists and bloggers are thrown in prison if they do not first yield to harassment, beatings, blackmail, or bribes.”

Aliyev regime sources have therefore dismissed the Azerbaijan Laundromat story as a “smear”. In a clear dogwhistle to borderline anti-Semites, it suggested the evidence brought against it was the product of the Jewish American billionaire George Soros, who is something of a bogeyman for some former Soviet regimes.

Mr Soros invests heavily in independent journalism and civic society programmes and funded one of the bodies behind the Laundromat, the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project.

Media close to the Azerbaijani regime immediately assaulted both the OCCRP – whose raw data has formed the basis for The Herald’s series of reports – and The Guardian. And they clearly tried to tap in to the same anti-media sentiment in the US, encouraged by President

Donald Trump, who also happens to be behind one of the new Baku skyscrapers thanks to a deal with an Azeri named in the Laundromat.

“Freedom of the press in the West is illusory,” said Day Az, the country’s first web newspaper. “This is confirmed by a crisis of trust in the mainstream media in Britain itself.” The paper called OCCRP, whose website has been blocked in Azerbaijan, “the lapdogs of Soros”.

Also to blame for the stories, said Azeri sources, were the Armenians. Azerbaijan fought a bloody war with its neighbours over a territorial dispute which has still not been resolved.

Oh, and MI6.

Europe is watching with concern. Money from the Laundromat, say investigators, was used to make payments to Western politicians sympathetic to Azerbaijan as Mr Aliyev plots a careful course between Russia, the EU and Middle Eastern neighbours.

Western leaders fear contagion from Azerbaijani corruption, press repression and authoritarianism thanks to money passed through Scottish firms.