It’s the shopping bill of the century – a spree that added up to more than £16m. The full details of the decade-long spending habit of the woman at the centre of the UK’s first McMafia-style “dirty money” investigation were revealed today in 107 pages of receipts from Harrods.
The statements, which detail Zamira Hajiyeva’s £16,309,077.87 of transactions from 2006 to 2016, show the 55-year-old treated the store in Knightsbridge, London, like a corner shop, popping in for £24,000 worth of tea and coffee spending £10,000 on fruit and veg, and £32,000 on Godiva chocolates.
She also splashed out £4.9m on Boucheron and Cartier jewellery and £300,000 on French couture label Celine. A further £251,000 was spent in the famous toy department and tens of thousands on Disney princess experiences at the Bibbidi Bobbidi Boutique.
Hajiyeva’s bills shows she regularly stopped off for a break at designer Tom Dixon’s sandwich cafe. A hog roast sandwich and crisps at the now-defunct cafe cost £13.90, but Hajiyeva managed to ring up a total of £322,000 at the till.
Hajiyeva is the subject of the UK’s first unexplained wealth order (UWO) and the National Crime Agency (NCA) has taken her to court to request a clear account of how she and her husband could afford to spend quite so much at Harrods. At first, she was referred to only as “Mrs A”, but she is the wife of Jahangir Hajiyev, 57, a former chairman of the state-owned International Bank of Azerbaijan who was sentenced to 15 years in jail for defrauding the bank out of up to 5bn manat (£2.2bn).
If Zamira Hajiyeva fails to explain to the legitimate source of her wealth to the high court she faces losing her £15m five-bedroom home – which is just 100 metres from the doors of Harrods – as well as a £10.5m Berkshire golf course.
She denies any wrongdoing and her lawyers have said the case against her husband was politically motivated. “The decision of the high court upholding the grant of an unexplained wealth order against Zamira Hajiyeva does not and should not be taken to imply any wrongdoing, whether on her part or that of her husband,” her lawyers have said previously. They did not respond to requests for comment on the details of the spending spree.
The Harrods spending records, which were released to the media on Tuesday after a legal case brought by the Guardian and other news outlets, shows that on 11 occasions Hajiyeva spent more than £250,000 in a single day in the department store. The NCA said she used 35 credit cards issued by her husband’s bank to fund this spending.
Many of the items bought may have been presents, as the receipts show that she spent £6,165 on gift wrapping. Adverts for jobs in the department claim “we wrap everything from engagement rings to helicopters”.
Hajiyeva also used a safety deposit box at the store. Other payments were made to the florist Moyses Stevens and Chai Wu, a Chinese restaurant
Some parts of the records are unclear, with the largest transactions described as “non-trade services” without further description. Harrods offers a range of services, from interior design to estate agency, and it is not clear from the bills which of these she used.
In concluding that media organisations should be provided with the Harrods evidence earlier this year, the high court judge Michael Supperstone ruled that those subject to investigation by law enforcement had no expectation of privacy if documents had been presented in open court.
The court has heard that Hajiyeva had access to a $42m (£33m) Gulfstream G550 jet and had a wine cellar stocked with some of the world’s most expensive bottles.
Lawyers for Hajiyeva argued in court that she should not have to prove the source of her wealth because she was not a “politically exposed person”, and said her husband was not a state employee overseeing a state bank but simply a “fat cat” banker.
In January police seized a Cartier diamond ring worth more than £1m bought by a Jahangir Hajiyev in Harrods in 2011. The NCA seized the ring from a high-end London jewellers, where it had been taken for repairs.
Jahangir Hajiyev’s official salary as IBA chairman between 2001 and 2008 was a maximum of £54,000. But Werner Capital, which manages property investments for wealthy people, produced a report in 2011 that said he was worth £55m.
Jonathan Hall QC, who is representing the NCA, has said: “As a state employee between 1993 and 2015, it is very unlikely that such a position would have generated sufficient income to fund the acquisition of the property.”
UWOs, which have been nicknamed McMafia laws after the hit BBC1 drama, are a new tool to help investigators crack down on the £90bn tide of “dirty money” flooding into London by forcing suspected corrupt government-linked officials to prove their wealth is legitimate.
