‘London laundromat’: how golden visa scheme created UK haven for dirty money
A multimillionaire DJ and her husband were last year forced to hand £4m to the National Crime Agency (NCA) after admitting in a settlement that they had brought the money into the UK illegally through a $2.9bn (£2.1bn) money-laundering scheme nicknamed the “Azerbaijani laundromat”.
Izzat Khanim Javadova, who performs in London and Ibiza as DJ Mikaela Jav, and her husband, Suleyman Javadov, entered the UK years earlier after investing at least £2m under the “golden visa” scheme that has attracted thousands of wealthy people from Russia and former Soviet states to settle in Britain. Most moved to London, nicknamed “Londongrad” in some circles.
Javadova, a cousin of the Azerbaijani president, Ilham Aliyev, and a daughter of a former Azerbaijani MP, was granted a “tier 1 investor visa” during a “blind faith period” between 2008 and 2015, when 97% of investors were subject to scant checks on the legitimacy of their wealth.
More than 3,000 people were granted investor visas during this period, including 705 Russians. They include:
● Zamira Hajiyeva, whose husband was the former chair of Azerbaijan’s state bank, who was served with the UK’s first unexplained wealth order after being found to have spent £1m a year at Harrods. Law enforcers alleged the money came from her husband Jahangir, who was sentenced to 15 years in jail in Azerbaijan.
● Nirav Modi, an Indian billionaire awaiting extradition over an accusation of defrauding a state-owned bank of £1.5bn.
● Mukhtar Ablyazov, the son of a former energy minister in Kazakhstan, accused of embezzling $5bn (£4bn) from a state bank and lying to a court about the scale of his vast fortune, including a £17m mansionon The Bishops Avenue in London.
After the 2018 Salisbury poisonings of
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