The mysterious Swiss fixer behind the operations of Azerbaijan’s presidential family

Mixing work with private life: the annex entrance to the offices and sometime formal residence of M.O. in western Switzerland. swissinfo.ch

A Swiss-French businessman has played a central role in setting up shadow companies for Azerbaijan’s ruling elite. We tried to track him down in Switzerland.

High above Lake Geneva behind a high stone wall sits a renovated 18^th– century castle that occupies a good part of a tiny village in western Switzerland. Mailboxes in front of the main entrance burst with uncollected mail and advertising brochures.
 
A buzzer at the gate indicates the names of two businesses linked to a Swiss-French lawyer at the centre of a web of companies owned by the family of Azerbaijan’s strongman president, Ilham Aliyev. The lawyer, who we refer to here as M.O to conform to Swiss media law, has also been described as a financier and an art collector. He was a central figure in investigations published in 2011 by Azeri journalist Khadija Ismayilova. In 2016 the massive financial data leak known as the Panama Papers confirmed her findings, which identified him as an instrumental figure in building the presidential family’s vast network of offshore companies that underpin the country’s economy.

Our attempts to locate M.O. were unsuccessful, nor could we reach him via publicly available profiles and contact information. Nevertheless, much is known about his life and ties to Switzerland thanks to publicly available documents. These include media investigations by Ismayilova into corruption by Aliyev’s family, now-accessible documents from Panamanian legal advisors Mossack Fonseca, and documents registered with French and Swiss public authorities available online. The information in this story is drawn from that reporting.

Switzerland and Azerbaijan strengthen ties

Azerbaijan, rated by Transparency International as one of the world’s most corrupt countries, is hosting the COP29 United Nations climate conference. The regime of Azeri President Ilham Aliyev has been accused of violating human rights and freedoms in Azerbaijan, and his family is estimated to be worth billions of dollars.
 
In an email, a spokesperson from the Swiss foreign ministry wrote that “regarding Azerbaijan, Switzerland has expressed its position on human rights issues at both multilateral and bilateral levels, especially concerning recent waves of arrests.”

Late last year, Switzerland’s ambassador to Azerbaijan, Thomas Stähli, said that he would make “maximum efforts” to strengthen economic ties between the two countries. Since the early 2000s, Switzerland’s interest in diversifying its energy sources has brought it closer to Azerbaijan, with Bern playing a key role in promoting the Trans-Adriatic Pipeline to bring Azeri gas to Europe. In recent years, the Swiss retail chain Migros has come under fire for a franchise agreement with Baku’s official energy company, Socar, to operate its Migrolino petrol-station shops. Critics say sales at these outlets may have helped to finance Azerbaijan’s military campaign against Armenians. The retail giant has previously maintained that it “respects regulations”, pointing to an absence of sanctions against the Central Asian state.

Read more about the Migros deal and Socar’s role in Switzerland in this story.  

How the Swiss government allows ‘fixers’ to operate

M.O. is a “fixer” or enabler who belongs to Switzerland’s wider financial sector encompassing lawyers, accountants and other experts helping clients to manage their wealth. Before they were suspended in 2018, Switzerland’s banking secrecy rules attracted the rich – and sometimes the corrupt – who found businesses to partner with in the Alpine state.
 
But despite the lifting of banking secrecy laws and a draft proposal by the Swiss government to regulate the role of enablers following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Swiss lawyers are not subject to the same due diligence obligations as financial institutions.

A person of ‘particular interest’

Born in Besançon, France, M.O. was described in an edition of an English-language magazine published by Condé Nast and edited by Aliyev’s ldest daughter, Leyla, as a lawyer and an art gallery owner in the Azeri capital, Baku. (The article, published in 2009, is no longer available online).
 
M.O. was found to be so close to Azerbaijan’s regime that in 2011 the United States Department of State listed him among “Azerbaijani officials of particular interest”.
 
Findings by the investigative journalist Ismayilova showed that M.O.’s name often came up in the registration of offshore companies owned by Leyla Aliyeva and her sister, Arzu, that controlled key sectors of Azerbaijan’s economy, such as the telecommunications industry.

swissinfo.ch

The Media Rights Institute in Baku told Ismayilova that the communications ministry requires mobile phone companies to facilitate government surveillance of communications.

The 62-year-old lawyer was also listed as a senior manager in three other companies registered in Panama and co-managed by the Aliyeva sisters. One was Globex International, a shell company based in the United Kingdom and part of a joint venture that controls 70% of Azerbaijan’s mines.
 
In the run-up to the United Nations Climate Conference (COP29) in Baku, the government promoted mining in the “liberated territories” of Nagorno-Karabakh, a long-disputed ethnic-Armenian enclave in the west of the country. Following Azerbaijan’s offensive into what is also called Upper Karabakh, the UN estimated that less than 1,000 of the enclave’s former Armenian majority remained. The Azeri mining sector has also been the subject of protests over non-payment of salaries to employees and environmental abuses.

Covering tracks

Published by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Ismayilova’s reports outlined a maze of shadow companies linked to the Aliyev family and how they violated existing national legislation. Politicians, including the Azerbaijani president, are required to declare assets, but no information was ever provided. Nor did they follow legal requirements regarding public tenders, with major service and construction contracts having been allocated to companies controlled by the presidential family. Following Ismayilova’s reporting, M.O. disappeared from public records. In 2018, Azeri media reported that he was “removed” from the board of one of the country’s key holding companies, AtaHolding.
 
“When a highly visible person like [M.O.] is exposed, the government is able to easily replace him and to hide his ties,” said Emin Huseynov, an Azerbaijani journalist and human rights activist in Switzerland. “It’s possible to find hundreds of guys like him in Switzerland, but if he’s trustworthy, he could find friends or colleagues [willing to step in to replace him].”

In Switzerland M.O. founded two companies that provide financial and other services. The firms were registered at the same addresses in Geneva before being transferred to his Swiss château.

His financial and legal advisory company Crescent Lake Finance was established in 2006, four years after Privaxis, an asset management firm, of which M.O. was a director until 2012.

Contacted by phone, an employee at Privaxis refused to answer questions, saying it only responds to clients, before hanging up. On its website, the firm states that it is licenced by Finma, the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority. 
 
Revidor, Privaxis’ auditor, refused to answer questions about its oversight of its client, citing confidentiality agreements.

Prosecuting enablers is difficult

M.O. went on to share his skills with other clients from the former Soviet Union. According to public filingsExternal link, he acted as a managerExternal link in real estate investment companies for two Russian art collectors and bankers, Alexei and Dimitry Ananyev, who were later accused of embezzlementExternal link in Russia.
 
In 2022, following revelations of other authoritarian leaders laundering money through Switzerland, international authorities called on oversight bodies to do a better job of flagging bad apples. But experts say that the sheer number of lawyers who may be laundering money for so-called politically exposed persons (PEPs) has made the task of prosecuting them more difficult.

“There are so many Swiss enablers and lawyers working in Geneva, Zurich and Lugano and elsewhere, controlling offshore companies and most of the time, nothing happens to them,” a Swiss money laundering expert told SWI swissinfo.ch. “The authorities may go after the people working in companies involved in big corruption cases. The enablers come in fourth or fifth place, and most times the law enforcement agencies don’t have the resources to go after them.”
 
M.O. has no criminal charges against him in Switzerland. No criminal proceedings are known to be pending in other countries.

Next moves

Nevertheless, the expert speculated that some PEP fixers may now be under more pressure. “Since the US began adding a couple of Swiss enablers to the sanctions list, I think they are starting to become more careful. Some have offices elsewhere in the British Virgin Islands or the Bahamas and may even move to Dubai or other places.”

For his part, M.O. appears to have moved on. 
 
Having for a time owned an art gallery in Baku, he became a patron of the Louvre Abu Dhabi, the region’s largest museum, and loaned pieces from his private collection for local exhibits.

In July, M.O. altered his surname on registration documents for a chateau he purchased in the French Basque region and which he registered as a joint stock company with his five children.  
 
M.O. did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

*The identity of the author has been withheld from this story for security reasons.

Edited by Veronica De Vore/gw