Sale of seized Ascot golf course and £14m London home under way

Moves to sell a Berkshire golf club and a £14m Knightsbridge house which were forfeited by a jailed banker’s wife have begun.

Zamira Hajiyeva agreed to give up the assets after a six-year National Crime Agency (NCA) investigation, which resulted in the UK’s first unexplained wealth order (UWO).

Mrs Hajiyeva’s husband, Jahangir, was the chairman of the state-controlled International Bank of Azerbaijan from 2001 to 2015 and is serving a 16-year jail sentence for fraud and embezzlement.

The NCA confirmed a trustee had been appointed by the High Court to sell the Mill Ride Golf Club in Ascot and the London house.

The agency believes the golf course and house were obtained as a “direct result of large-scale fraud and embezzlement, false accounting and money laundering”.

It said it had found “no reasonable explanation” for the source of funds used to buy both of them.

Mrs Hajiyeva was the first person made the subject of a UWO, a power brought into force in January 2018 under so-called McMafia laws.

They were named after the BBC organised crime drama and the book by journalist Misha Glenny which inspired it.

Under a UWO, if a person cannot explain how they became legitimately rich, the courts can fast-track the seizure of their property, without investigators having even proven a crime.

Documents published on the Companies House website on Friday show the NCA was appointed as a person of significant control of MRGC 2013 Ltd, which owns the club, in September.

The BBC previously reported that Mrs Hajiyeva spent £16m at Harrods in a decade.

An NCA spokesperson said: “A trustee has been appointed by the High Court whose function is to realise the value of the two properties by selling them. The process has commenced but is likely to take some time.”

The spokesperson said 70% of the net proceeds of the sales would be kept by the government “in line with usual processes, minus the NCA’s reasonably incurred costs”, which the agency will retain itself.

The other 30% will be returned to Mrs Hajiyeva, the spokesperson added.