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The villa, the businessman, and the stolen millions: From the French Riviera to Luxembourg, revelations on Azerbaijan’s ill-gotten gains
A villa on the French Riviera, shady business arrangements in Luxembourg, a disgraced public notary, and the shadow of Khagani Bashirov, a Franco-Azerbaijani businessman suspected of embezzling millions of euros: this is what we found when we completed the investigation of an imprisoned Azerbaijani journalist.
- Behind a villa on the French Riviera valued at €5.8 million, we discovered a Russian-doll-like business setup involving Luxembourg and companies mentioned in the Panama Papers.
- The villa was owned by an Azerbaijani civil servant and his wife, a francophile who has received the Legion of Honor and an Order of Academic Palms.
- Khagani Bashirov, a Franco-Azerbaijani businessman indicted in Luxembourg for money laundering, was at one time in business with the owner of the villa via a company supposedly involved in cotton.
- In 2019, the villa was bought by a Monaco-based company. Its current owner is the brother of the economic advisor to the President of the Republic of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev.
By Eloïse Layan and Youssr Youssef
November 8, 2024
Translated by Amy Thorpe
Leyla Mustafayeva (Abzas Media), Karina Chabour (France 24), Roméo Langlois (France 24), Sebastian Seibt (France 24), Pierre Sorlut (d’Lëtzebuerger Land), James Dowsett (OCCRP) and Kelly Bloss (OCCRP) have contributed to this article.
From the terrace of Santa Monica Villa, the view over the Cap Ferrat harbor and the blue waters of the Mediterranean is breathtaking. The area is one of the most popular in Villefranche-sur-Mer, and the villa sits just meters away from one of the most famous buildings of the French Riviera, the former residence of Belgium’s King Leopold II.
It was here, in 2008, that an Azerbaijani couple bought their second home, valued at €5.8 million and covered with bright pink bougainvillea.
The Villa Santa Monica in 2004, a few years before it was sold to Panah Jahangirov and Reyhan Huseynova © Manfred Ramin
The owner’s name is Panah Jahangirov. A civil servant assigned in the 2010s to the administration of Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, Jahangirov is a reserved man, according to an architect who worked for him. His wife, Reyhan Huseynova, is a radiant academic, who posts photos of her conferences in Finland and Dubai on social media. She is part of the Azerbaijani elite: her father, Kamran Huseynov, was regarded as “a rare personality” by former president Heydar Aliyev. Her sister is a member of parliament affiliated with the presidential party.
Reyhan Huseynova is also a Francophile. Close to French high society, she was awarded the Legion of Honor in 2016 for her role in the “Azerbaijan-France” Friendship Group, as well as the Order of Academic Palms for the university exchanges she organizes in France for her students. In 2015, a group of French writers and journalists, including Michka Assayas and Natacha Wolinski, met Huseynova during a trip to Baku. One person on the trip described her as “a lover of France” who can recite French poetry from memory. Huseynova and her husband, according to several people close to them, are “very respectable” people.
Panah Jahangirov at a conference on religious extremism. He is a former civil servant in the Department of Interethnic Relations, Multiculturalism and Religious Affairs of the Presidential Administration. © Youtube screenshot, CBC FM Azerbaijan
The Legion of Honor ceremony for Reyhan Huseynova (left), in the presence of France’s ambassador to Azerbaijan, Aurélia Bouchez. Reyhan Huseynova was awarded “notably for her leadership role in the Azerbaijan-France Friendship Group”
But in 2023, the couple and their villa aroused the suspicion of a journalist from the independent Azerbaijani outlet Abzas Media. That journalist won’t be able to complete their investigation. At the end of 2023, that reporter was arrested, along with five other members of the outlet’s staff.
Six members of Abzas Media are still behind bars.
In this new investigation, part of the Baku Connection project, Forbidden Stories pursued their work with Abzas Media, France 24, D’Lëtzebuerger Land and OCCRP.
They were among the last in the country investigating the abuses of power in the Aliyev regime.
Abzas’s journalists face risks every day for questioning the elite and its malfeasance.
“We are an anti-corruption media,” Editor-in-chief Leyla Mustafayeva, who is currently exiled in Europe, said. “We investigate cases that generally involve President Aliyev’s family and inner circle, the political elite, and ministers: corruption cases with foreign bank accounts, shell companies, and money stolen from Azerbaijan and spent on yachts, sometimes in the Gulf States, sometimes in Europe.”
Rich in gas and oil, Azerbaijan is also rife with scandals. In 2010, the country discovered that President Aliyez’s son, then 11 years old, owned nine villas worth €30 million in Dubai. In 2021, the Pandora Papers revealed the existence of dozens of offshore companies owned by the Aliyev family and their associates, as well as assets in England valued at almost €600 million.
The executives and employees of Abzas Media have been arrested for their investigations into corruption,” reads the media’s Facebook banner. From left to right: Elnara Gasimova, Mahammad Kekalov, Hafiz Babali, Ulvi Hasanli, Nargiz Absalamova and Sevinc Vaqifqizi.
The mysterious villa
We discovered the Santa Monica Villa story through the Safebox Network, a messaging system developed by Forbidden Stories to protect the work of threatened journalists. The draft of an investigation was uploaded there by the Abzas team. Why exactly the investigation’s author was interested in this villa on the French Riviera is hard to say, as it was impossible for us to communicate with the imprisoned Abzas journalists without endangering them.
Was it because of the profile of the owner, a civil servant able to afford a multi-million euro property on the Riviera? Or was it because of the involvement of Khagani Bashirov, a scandalous Azerbaijani businessman who also holds a French passport and whose name regularly crops up in embezzlement cases?
Thanks to the information uploaded to Safebox, we were able to pick up the thread of this investigation and publish the results, as Baku prepares to welcome the global community for COP 29, and meanwhile muzzles critical voices with total impunity.
On the deed of sale for the Santa Monica Villa, signed in 2008, the names of Panah Jahangirov and Reyhan Huseynova don’t appear. The reason: the villa’s ownership is intertwined with a cascade of Luxembourg limited companies. Among them is Lannage S.A., which was managed by Jean Bodoni, then head of a subsidiary of Banque Internationale à Luxembourg (Dexia BIL) called Experta.
“A priori, if a resident of Azerbaijan wants to buy a property in France, there is no reason to set up a company in Luxembourg – unless you want to hide something else like your identity, or you’re in the process of estate planning,” Bodoni said in a telephone conversation.
So, what were the Jahangirov couple trying to hide? The identity of the villa’s real owners? Or the origin of the funds used to buy it?
The 75-year-old Bodoni says he has no recollection of any Azeri clients, let alone of the limited company set up to purchase the villa. He has set up companies of this kind on an industrial scale: “thousands,” in his own words.
Bodoni is no stranger to the world of offshore finance. In fact, his name appears in hundreds of emails and documents from the Panama Papers, unveiled by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) in 2016. The Panamanian firm Mossack Fonseca, the source of an enormous data leak, has set up over 1,500 offshore companies for Experta, which it describes as its “number one client.” When we discussed these details, Bodoni said that during those years, he acted in compliance with the law. He even retains a certain nostalgia for those “good old days,” when the clients were “rich” and “we had fun … and did good business” during “a time that wasn’t completely innocent, I agree, but only in retrospect.”
The companies behind the purchase of the Santa Monica villa made by the Jahangirov-Huseynova couple. © Forbidden Stories diagram with data obtained with courtesy of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists
With no trace of the real buyers in the official documents, we turned to the former owner of the Santa Monica Villa, Manfred Ramin. Contacted by our colleagues at France 24, this 84-year-old retired orchestra conductor remembers the Jahangirov couple well, having met them before concluding the sale.
“They really impressed us, especially the wife, [Reyhan Huseynova], since she was very musically inclined and was delighted to see the grand piano,” said Ramin. “It was our neighbor, Eldar Garibov, who introduced us.”
Head of one of Azerbaijan’s largest private banks, Unibank, Eldar Garibov is by no means unknown. In 2015, a year before Huseynova, he too was awarded the Legion of Honor by the French ambassador to Azerbaijan. Garibov didn’t just help the Jahangirov couple find property on the French Riviera. Allegedly, he also brought one of his bank’s shareholders to Villefranche-sur-Mer: Baylar Mammadov, a businessman close to President Aliyev’s family who owns a villa purchased in 2009 for €5.2 million.
Reyhan Huseynova’s Facebook post: picture taken in Villefranche-sur-Mer.
The “Bashirov system”
The French Riviera attracts Azerbaijan’s elite, among them the president himself. Ilham Aliyev and his entourage have regularly cruised the Riviera between Cannes and Saint-Tropez aboard €25 million yachts, complete with leather furniture and a black marble bathtub, according to an investigation by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP). Aliyev’s sister owns two villas in Saint-Tropez. The first, which boasts a swimming pool and 15 bedrooms, is valued at €5.2 million. The second, purchased by the company SCI Joli Sourire, is worth €15.9 million, according to a Nouvel Obs investigation.
By comparison, Jahangirov’s profile and lifestyle are far less ostentatious. To understand why the now-imprisoned Abzas journalist was so interested in him, we had to track down Jahangirov’s business partners. Jahangirov may have been a civil servant in the Presidential Administration’s Department of Inter-Ethnic Relations, Multi-Culturalism, and Religious Affairs, but his strongest ties are to the cotton industry. This is confirmed by documents detailing the corporate purpose of Consolidated Equipments, an obscure Luxembourg company of which he is the director. Perhaps it was the identity of the company’s owner that piqued the curiosity of the Abzas journalist.
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At the head of Consolidated Equipments is 63-year-old Khaghani Bashirov. His name crops up in several criminal and civil investigations in Europe. Suspected of embezzling over €100 million, he was imprisoned in Azerbaijan in 2010, although proceedings were later dropped. In the UK, in 2023, he reappeared in an asset recovery investigation by the National Crime Agency. Bashirov is implicated in the embezzlement of funds from the International Bank of Azerbaijan (IBA), the country’s largest bank, mainly owned by the State. The bank’s director, Jahangir Hajiyev, is accused of embezzling nearly €3 billion and is currently incarcerated in Azerbaijan.
According to a National Crime Agency document dated 2023 and obtained by our colleagues at the OCCRP, Bashirov allegedly “facilitated the extraction of funds” via multiple businesses and approximately 470 bank accounts. Hajiyev’s assets include a villa and vineyards in Sardinia valued at €10.7 million, a private jet worth more than €30 million, and a golf course. Bashirov allegedly disguised the purchase of each with sophisticated business arrangements.
Interview with Khagani Bashirov broadcast in July 2023. This is the “first and last” interview he claims to have done © Screenshot, Youtube
By continuing the work of the imprisoned Abzas journalist, we have uncovered around a hundred companies, dozens of directors’ names, and a trust in Luxembourg, all of which compose the “Bashirov system.” Even some of Luxembourg’s most well-known figures are involved. Among the leaders of the shell companies involved are Philippe Dauvergne, a former senior French customs official, and Luxembourg diplomat Marc Hübsch. While the latter was working for the Luxembourg Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs between 2014 and 2016, he was simultaneously a director of one of Bashirov’s companies, Concept.com.
Most of the directors we contacted either refused to talk to us or denied any knowledge of money-laundering activities. Via our partner D’Lëtzebuerger Land, the former financial director of one of Bashirov’s trusts, Jean Riwers, agreed to tell us about what he called “empty cells.” In other words: companies created by Azerbaijani businessmen as shells to hide their business dealings behind.
“He had a mania for setting up companies one after another … There was no life to them, no economic life,” said Riwers, who declined to go into further detail.
“In all these, shall we say, shady affairs, the Azerbaijanis were the only ones in the know … But what Bashirov was doing here, above all, was messing with huge amounts of money,” he concluded.
Bashirov in “La Place”
Bashirov was once a prominent figure in Luxembourg’s financial center, known as “La Place.” He was seen as a socialite and “a connoisseur of wine and good food,” according to star chef and Luxembourg celebrity Léa Linster, who knew him well.
“He had his finger on the pulse of public life,” said former President of the Chamber of Deputies Laurent Mosar, who advised Bashirov from time to time.
An event at the Azerbaijani Cultural Association in Luxembourg attended by Michelin-starred chef Léa Linster (left), the diplomat Marc Hübsch (left) and the public notary Martine Schaeffer (right). © Photo Facebook
Bashirov also co-founded the Luxembourg-Azerbaijan Chamber of Commerce, then presided over by MP Jacques-Yves Henckes. Bashirov frequented the Hôtel Royal, attended birthday parties, and went to concerts at the Philharmonie. A cigar aficionado, according to Henckes, he was a regular at the Casa del Habano, where the Grand Duchy’s politicians also mingled. In a small country, “everything is about human contact,” said Henckes.
Not content to simply network, Bashirov embarked on an investment frenzy in the Grand Duchy. In 2008, he bought the Hotel Vauban, a prestigious address at the heart of Luxembourg’s capital overlooking Place Guillaume II. He paid €5.3 million for it via one of his companies, Vauban Investments S.A.
View from the Hotel Vauban: the Place Guillaume II, Luxembourg © Hotel website
In the same year, through another company, Bashirov bought office space on 51 Rue de Strasbourg. This is also where he would open the representative office of the International Bank of Azerbaijan, the bank whose funds would later be embezzled. Lëtzebuerger Journal, in an article on the inauguration of the site on January 22, 2008, mentions the presence of an advisor to the Minister of the Economy, Jeannot Krecké, who was dispatched for the occasion. The socialist minister had himself taken a delegation of businessmen to Baku, “impressed by the country’s economic potential,” the article said.
Baku and its cheap kerosene are of great interest to the Luxembourg air freight company Cargolux, which sees Azerbaijan as a strategic stopover for its aircraft en route to China. But the country’s general financial prospects are also garnering interest in the Grand Duchy. The IBA’s entrance into “La Place” was a welcome “new signal,” according to the Lëtzebuerger Journal, at a time when “the number of banks has declined considerably in recent years.” Allegedly, the Azerbaijani bank has already established privileged connections with a Luxembourg counterpart: Dexia BIL.
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Dexia BIL: The bank at the heart of the transactions
Dexia BIL hosts many of Bashirov’s company bank accounts. The Hotel Vauban? Purchased with a €2.7 million loan from Dexia, according to the UK’s National Crime Agency investigation. Fifty-one Rue de Strasbourg? Another Dexia loan. Even though he was the target of a judicial investigation in Azerbaijan as early as 2010, Bashirov held bank accounts at BIL until at least 2015, according to the NCA.
Dexia is a name known today for “the Dexia scandal.” It’s a bank with two bankruptcies, toxic loans, and €6.4 billion of public money injected by the Belgian, Luxembourg, and French governments after the 2008 financial crisis. But for Bashirov, contacted by telephone, at the time “it was one of the best banks in Luxembourg … and things were going very, very well.”
Bashirov maintains good relations with his advisors at BIL. One of the bank’s senior employees, in charge of Azeri clients in particular, quit her job to join Bashirov’s trust, according to the NCA investigation. It seems that no one at BIL seemed too suspicious of Bashirov. And it was BIL that lent Jahangirov and his wife about €5.5 million of the €5.8 million they needed to buy the Santa Monica Villa.
Even in the 2000s, banks already had an obligation to be vigilant; systems for checking customers, their reputations, and the origin of their funds were already in place. But there was “a fairly strong feeling of impunity, and a consumer market at risk because it’s customers whose money is on the line,” said Chanez Mensous, a banking and finance lawyer with the anti-corruption association Sherpa. At the time, the banks chose to do business with Bashirov despite his links to people vulnerable to corruption, such as the director of the state-owned IBA bank, Jahangir Hajiyev, and by extension the Azerbaijani authorities. Funds originating from a high-risk country and the presence of politically exposed persons (PEPs) should have aroused suspicion.
CSSF press release regarding an administrative sanction against the BIL. According to the BIL, this would concern ‘a sample of customers from countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States’.
It wasn’t until 2020 that BIL was sanctioned for ignoring these warning signs. Luxembourg’s Commission de Surveillance du Secteur Financier (CSSF) ordered the bank to pay €4.6 million for “weaknesses in its anti-money laundering system,” having consulted with a sample of clients from countries in the Commonwealth of Independent States (of which Azerbaijan is a member). When contacted, BIL did not respond to our questions, but asserted that it is “fully committed to the highest standards of compliance and transparency in all its processes, particularly with regard to the fight against money laundering.”
For his part, while claiming that he “doesn’t give interviews,” Bashirov stayed on the phone for 30 minutes with Forbidden Stories to explain his version of events.
“All the bankers accepted everything I did for 15 years, and then all of a sudden, I’m told, ‘no, no, no, Mr. Bashirov,’” he told us. “Look, if a banker had refused one of my transactions, I wouldn’t have gone through with it. Nor would I have if a lawyer or an accountant had told me, ‘no.’”
From bankers to accountants to notaries, there are now so many professions swept up in legal proceedings. They’re what we call “facilitators”: people who “play a pivotal role in money laundering, and who provide technical, operational, and legal assistance,” explains the lawyer Chanez Mensous.
In Bashirov’s case, the Luxembourg Chamber of Notaries was involved at the highest levels. In March 2024, after several years of investigation, the Chamber’s president, Martine Schaeffer, was summoned to appear before the criminal court for failing to meet her anti-money laundering obligations. In its ruling, the Luxembourg court stated that she “should have refused to approve (certain) real estate sale contracts” in 2017 and 2018 on behalf of Bashirov’s companies. The court traced financial flows from Russia, the British Virgin Islands, and other offshore centers, and Schaeffer was fined €70,000.
The President of Luxembourg’s Chamber of Notaries, Martine Schaeffer who made the headlines in May 2024, after being sanctioned by the courts for property sales made on behalf of companies owned by Khagani Bashirov.
Throughout the course of our investigation, we came across Schaeffer’s name again and again. It appears dozens of times in the incorporation documents of the companies that make up the “Bashirov system,” notably in those of Consolidated Equipments, the business managed for a time by the owner of the Villefranche-sur-Mer villa, Jahangirov. By email, Schaeffer asserted that she was “a simple notary” who had “carried out [her] anti-money laundering research with the few resources [she] had at the time.”
As for Bashirov himself, the Luxembourg judiciary seems to be closing in, having delved deep into his past activities. The Luxembourg Prosecutor General’s Office told us that “during four days of questioning, which took place this October, Mr. Bashirov was indicted by the examining magistrate with forgery, money laundering, and breach of professional obligations.”
Bashirov refutes these accusations, saying, “Luxembourg allows things to be done for years, and then they start asking questions about what their administration has been allowed to get away with!”
“That’s not done anywhere else. It’s against the law!” he concluded, adding in passing, “Luxembourg isn’t Europe – it’s anything but.”
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Laundered cotton
If the name of an obscure villa owner ever showed up on the radar of Abzas Media’s investigators, maybe it’s because it appears in black and white in the articles of association for Consolidated Equipments, the company set up in Luxembourg – alongside the name of the owner, Khagani Bashirov. Panah Jahangirov was the company’s director from 2006 to 2010, a key period during which the business received funds originating from the Continus Corporation. This shell company would later be implicated in the immense Azerbaijani Laundromat scandal, which saw a €2.5 billion slush fund be paid out in bribes to European politicians and Azerbaijanis between 2012 and 2014.
Bank statements accessed by our partners at OCCRP show two transfers from Continus Corporation to Consolidated Equipments of €160,000 and €26,000 in 2007. On the same day as the €26,000 transaction, Jahangirov himself received €30,000 from Continus Corporation in his own bank account.
Since then, Consolidated Equipments has also been named in an Azerbaijan Supreme Court judgment concerning 69 companies alleged to have received embezzled money from the IBA via unpaid bank loans.
Transfers from Continus Corporation, a shell company, to Consolidated Equipments and to Panah Jahangirov, when Jahangirov was one of Consolidated Equipments’ directors in 2007.
When contacted, Jahangirov and his wife refused to answer our questions. The exchange with Huseynova was brief: “We don’t have a villa in France. The villa was sold ten years ago. Ok? Bye!”
It was also impossible to find out what Jahangirov’s current occupation is. However, in his telephone interview with Forbidden Stories, Bashirov shed some light on the man’s past. He alleged that before becoming a civil servant, Jahangirov was involved in the cotton business. For 25 years Jahangirov seemingly worked in the sector, in particular on behalf of the former director of the IBA, Jahangir Hajiyev. According to Bashirov, toward the end of the 2000s, “Panah Jahangirov had problems with Mr. Hajiyev. The bank no longer wanted to cooperate with him. He lost all he had, and was forced to sell everything.”
A Santa Monica Villa, a new owner close to power
Were financial troubles at the heart of their real estate troubles? It seems Jahangirov and his wife only spent a few summers at the villa, which was hurriedly furnished. Renovation projects were abandoned. In 2014, the villa was in arrears and subject to a tax lien from the French Treasury. In the end, the couple had to sell.
Construction plan of the Santa Monica villa envisaged in 2016, according to the building permit. The request is made on behalf of Shahin Movsumov, the brother of economic advisor to the Azeri President of the President Ilham Aliyev.
Today, nothing remains of the building, which was demolished. A stalled construction site sits in its place on 2 Boulevard de Suède in Villefranche-sur-Mer. But the new owner has big plans: “French-style gardens on the lower level, a swimming pool, terraces, and a guest villa. And underneath, we have a parking lot that will allow us to accommodate around 20 cars,” said architect Philippe Mialon, who was at one point in charge of the planning.
The villa is no longer owned by a Luxembourg company but rather by one based in Monaco, called Boulevard Side. With no offices, no employees, and no website, signs point to Boulevard Side being nothing more than a mailbox, according to our France 24 colleagues who visited Monaco.
In reality, the house has remained in the Azerbaijani fold, bought by a rich and powerful man named Shahin Movsumov. Head of the Azerbaijani conglomerate AS Group, he also has links to the government. His brother is President Ilham Aliyev’s economic advisor.
Last October, just a few weeks before COP 29 kicked off, the European Parliament condemned “the repression of activists, journalists, and opposition leaders” in Azerbaijan. The Euro-deputies also stated “that the violations committed by Azerbaijan are incompatible with the hosting of COP 29.”
Far from the sunshine of the French Riviera, the six members of Abzas Media are still incarcerated. On November 4, 2024, Abzas published a letter written by the outlet’s director, Ülvi Hasanli, from the Baku pre-trial detention center. In it, he describes pressure, extortion, corruption, the screams of prisoners, and the noise of torture sessions. He was personally deprived of any contact with the outside world during his first three months in detention and was not allowed to see his child for six months. The Abzas journalists face up to 12 years in prison.
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