Having opened bank accounts with Credit Suisse, Barclays, and other foreign banks, Rza and Seymur Talibov received over $20 million in suspicious wire transfers, even as the people of the Azerbaijani exclave of Nakhchivan suffered under their father’s dictatorial rule. The revelation was made by the
OCCRP Center for Corruption and Organized Crime.
The Talibov brothers’ bank accounts received dozens of wire transfers from shell companies that were part of the Azerbaijani and Troika Laundromats, two massive money laundering systems previously uncovered by OCCRP.
A financial crime expert who reviewed the transactions found multiple red flags for money laundering that he said banks should have noticed.
In subsequent years, the brothers bought up properties in Dubai and Georgia worth an estimated $63 million.
Four years later, just as the Laundromat transactions reached their peak, Rza bought two adjacent buildings in the Georgian resort town of Batumi that he converted into a five-star hotel.
Rza, Seymur, and their sister Baharkhanim - who also received nearly a million dollars from Laundromat companies - have also acquired about a dozen properties in Dubai, including a luxurious villa, a 12-floor apartment hotel, and multiple individual apartments. In total, their properties are worth an estimated $63 million.
Vasif Talibov has ruled over Nakhchivan for so long that it’s hard to imagine the territory without him. But his beginnings were modest: In the late Soviet years he was the head of a department at a local garment factory.
His ticket to power turned out to be his marriage to Sevil Sultanova, whose mother’s uncle was a senior Soviet official named Heydar Aliyev.
As the country neared collapse in 1990, Aliyev returned from Moscow to his home region of Nakhchivan. Having nowhere else to stay, he temporarily lived with Talibov in his two-bedroom apartment.
This has earned Nakhchivan a variety of nicknames: Opposition activists call it the “North Korea of Azerbaijan,” while the Norwegian Helsinki Committee described it as “Azerbaijan’s Dark Island.”
