Money Laundering and Tax Evasion (Azerbaijan)

Debate between Baroness Hodge of Barking and Paul Flynn

Thursday 19th October 2017 Commons Chamber

[Dame Margaret Hodge]

I do, and I will come to that later in my speech.

Our corporate rules and our weak regulatory framework are a gift to villains. Far from being proud, we should be ashamed. Today, I want to try to convince the Minister and the Government to act urgently to destroy the opportunities we are allowing, which are exploited by criminals and make us complicit in their crimes. We can stop this, but at the moment we are choosing not to do so.

Azerbaijan is well-known as a corrupt kleptocracy. It comes 123rd out of the 176 countries assessed on Transparency International’s index of corruption. Heydar Aliyev, the father of the current President, was head of the KGB in Azerbaijan in 1967, when Azerbaijan was part of the Soviet Union, and he became a full member of the Soviet Politburo in 1982. When Russia broke up, he moved seamlessly to become Azerbaijan’s ruling President in 1993, and he cracked down viciously on all opposition voices. He passed the presidency on to his son 10 years later, and Ilham Aliyev then pushed through constitutional changes to abolish the limit on the number of times one person could stand for office and to extend each term of office to seven years.

[Paul Flynn (Newport West) (Lab)]

Will my right hon. Friend send a copy of her speech to all the new delegates to the Council of Europe from this place, because there are examples in the recent past of Members of this House giving tacit support to and acting as apologists for the den of thieves that is Azerbaijan?

[Dame Margaret Hodge]

I welcome that suggestion and will do that.

Ilham Aliyev remains President to this day, and in February this year he appointed his wife Mehriban as First Vice-President, in effect anointing her his successor. According to Human Rights Watch, the ruling élite

“continues to wage a vicious crackdown on critics and dissenting voices”.

But the Azerbaijani Government do want to be respected by the international community, in part because they want to sell us their oil and gas. That is why they worked to become full members of the Council of Europe, why winning the Eurovision song contest mattered and why hosting the European games in Baku was important. The so-called Azerbaijan laundromat that we are discussing today was a scheme designed to launder money out of Azerbaijan—money used to curry influence and bribe European politicians, lobbyists and apologists, and further to line the pockets of the Aliyev family and their cronies.

The scheme was revealed by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, working internationally with newspapers, including The Guardian. The leaked documents covered payments over a two-year period from June 2012 until the end of 2014. The payments amounted to €2.9 billion.