The Herald (Glasgow), Scotland
Tuesday
Scots firm launders cash used to pay US lobbyists
by David Leask
ONE of Europe's most corrupt and authoritarian regimes used a Scottish firm to secretly buy influence in America, investigators say.
Figures close to the government of Azerbaijan have long been suspected of using laundered money to pay for a slush fund for sympathetic politicians in the West.
Last year the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) revealed that some £2 billion had been smuggled out of the oil-rich former Soviet nation through a complex web of shell firms, some of them Scottish.
Now the investigative journalism group says that some of that money was recycled back into Azerbaijan and then on to the United States to pay a lobbying firm.
Their research centres on two anonymously owned shell firms, one an English limited liability partnership and the other a Scottish Limited Partnership (SLP).
The SLP, Glasgow-registered Hilux Services, was one of the core entities in what the OCCRP called the Azerbaijani Laundromat, a scheme to recycle cash of an unknown origin believed to be partly linked to the state.
OCCRP said some $1.6 million was paid by Hilux and a Birmingham firm to what it called a mysterious organisation called Renaissance Associates in Azerbaijan's capital Baku.
Renaissance, OCCRP reported, then paid a US lobbying firm "to orchestrate praise for Azerbaijan and had its representatives make thousands of dollars in campaign donations, including to Senators and Representatives who sat on committees which determine foreign aid budgets".
OCCRP named a parliamentarian charged with cleaning up the image of Azerbaijan and its leader, Ilham Aliyev as being behind the lobbying.
Renaissance has no website and no contact information. OCCRP said Renaissance's only reported activity had been a 14-year-old relationship with Bob Lawrence & Associates (BL&A), a lobbying firm in Alexandria, Virginia. BL&A under US law had to reveal it was paid $1,533,000 by Renaissance, about the same amount the Azerbaijani firm got from Hilux and the English business associated with the Laundromat.
BL&A, among other things, has lobbied America on Azerbaijan's interest in Nagorno-Karabakh, a territory disputed by the country and its neighbour, Armenia.
The firm, however, denies working for the Azerbaijan government. The mysterious Renaissance is not a government agency.
Hilux Services, meanwhile, was dissolved in 2016.
It is not the first SLP to be named in an lobbying row.
Earlier this year The Herald revealed Biniatta Trade paid a Washington lobbyist to help Balkan conservatives access Donald Trump's White House.
Biniatta Trade emerged as an unlikely funder of a campaign to promote Albania's right-wing opposition in America.
The firm claims to trade in grain and cloth from its prestigious address at a virtual office in Edinburgh's New Town.
Such firms are routinely marketed in as secrecy vehicles in the former Soviet Union. Biniatta shares founding partners with entities linked with Russia and Ukraine, sparking news stories in the US suggesting it was a Russian front.
However, shared formal partners may only indicate the shell firm was manufactured by the same agency as those used by Russians. A Northern Ireland partnership, meanwhile, was used to lobby for Ukrainian opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko.
