The Power Players

The Pandora Papers provide a view of the startling scale of the Aliyev children’s luxury property investments. They were shareholders of 44 companies registered in the British Virgin Islands between 2006 and 2018. The records show the children owned five companies used to buy more than $120 million worth of high-end London properties between 2006 and 2009, many of which were later sold for vast profits.

Heydar Aliyev, the president’s youngest child, was just 11 years old when he became the shareholder a BVI-registered company that had just bought a $49 million office block in Mayfair, one of London’s most elite neighborhoods.

Seven months later, an offshore company owned by his older sister, Arzu, bought an office building just one street down. When the building was sold nine years later, the company recorded a $40-million profit.

And in 2009, a company owned by the eldest child, Leyla Aliyeva, bought a $13.5 million corner building behind London’s Oxford Circus, which has housed a string of businesses run by Aliyev family friends.

Starting in 2013, the children transferred shares in their offshore companies to their maternal grandfather, Arif Pashayev. The holdings were later transferred to a series of trusts based in the Isle of Man, a British dependency and secrecy haven.

Pashayev and two close associates bought further properties in and around London worth more than $500 million between 2006 and 2017, records show.

None of the Aliyev family responded to ICIJ’s repeated requests for comment.

Trident Trust began registering the Aliyevs’ companies in 2007 and remained the registered agent for the family’s companies for at least a decade.

The files show that even on the occasions when the children were named in Trident’s due diligence documents as “beneficiaries,” or owners, questions about whether they were politically exposed persons -- which should trigger enhanced reporting requirements -- were left blank.

Trident continued to act as the companies’ registered agent after several of them were transferred to a series of trust companies under the management of Suntera Global in the Isle of Man.

A spokesperson for Trident Trust said that each of its businesses was fully committed to compliance with all applicable regulations, and that it “routinely cooperates with any competent authority which requests information.”