AA16CR11ADD1

AS (2016) CR 11
Addendum 1

2016 ORDINARY SESSION

________________________

(Second part)

REPORT

Eleventh sitting

Monday 18 April 2016 at 3.00 p.m.

Current affairs debate:

The case of the “Panama Papers” and the concern about
fiscal, social justice and public trust in our democratic system

The following texts were submitted for inclusion in the official report by members who were present in the Chamber but were prevented by lack of time from delivering them.

Mr FARMANYAN (Armenia) – Let me briefly quote a quite impressive story by Khadija Ismayilova, a prominent Azerbaijani journalist and human rights defender, still behind bars in Baku: “At the end of a month’s work, Jamshud Asgerli, a 46 year old geologist and father of three, along with 300 other employees of a gold mining company, were notified that they would be on vacation for two months. After that period of time had expired, the employees received another notification informing them that they would be on vacation indefinitely. None of the employees had been paid a single cent by the company which had come out of nowhere and had, within a short space of time, become the second largest gold producing company in Azerbaijan. The employees reached out to all governmental agencies possible, including the presidential administration, requesting that their salaries be paid.” “They all claimed that they didn’t know anything and it was impossible to understand who were the owners of the company to whom we should address our problems”, said Jamshud Asgerli.

But the employees were closer to the right addressee than Mr. Asgerli and his colleagues could ever have imagined. The Panama papers came to show that they were Leyla and Arzu Alievas, President Aliyev’s daughters. The Panama papers revealed that the Aliyev family were 70% stakeholders in that very company, namely Azerbaijani International Mineral Resources Operating Company, as well as in many other offshore companies, while the remaining 30 % of income went to the State budget.

While the Panama papers have shocked the international community, generating political crisis in many countries and bringing about the resignation of one high-ranking official after another, there is only one country in the Council of Europe zone whose population is not allowed to receive information about this scandal, never mind discuss it: Azerbaijan. Even members of the Azerbaijani Parliament sitting next to us at the Assembly can confirm this – there is nothing in these papers about the Aliyev family, or if there is, it is the result of the Armenian lobby. That is how things which are not even related to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict are read, perceived and interpreted by Aliyev’s autocratic regime.

We cannot ignore the claim that the date the Panama files were disclosed by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) was one of the major factors which pushed Aliyev to start a large-scale military aggression against the people of Nagorno-Karabakh, just a few days before the papers were leaked, simply to divert the attention of his own people from this breaking and explosive scandal.

Ms KARAPETYAN (Armenia) – A few hours ago, while discussing the progress report, we heard a touching speech by Azerbaijani MPs about the so-called huge progress made in that country, but very recently the world was shocked by the revelations of the Panama papers which exposed the exceptional place of honour occupied by the President of Azerbaijan and his family – his wife, his daughters, his sister.

The International Consortium of Investigating Journalists planned the date on which the results of its year-long work would be published – the beginning of April 2016 – and it is obvious that the date of Azerbaijan’s unprecedented aggression was not chosen by chance; it started at the very same time, and one of the reasons for this was to divert the attention of the Azeri society from this state of affairs.

While the “first ladies” lead their nice, leisurely lives with billion-dollar incomes that even 10 generations of the Aliyev family would not be able to spend, the ordinary women of Azeri society are suffering the pain of losing their sons in this new wave of aggression, triggered by Aliyev’s regime. Today, we learned that a corrupt high-ranking politician is a serious danger not only for the rule of law, but also for international human rights – the right to life.

The billions of dollars generated by these offshore corporations owned by the Aliyev family’s female members, as well as the dollars spent on weaponry and the army, may have been spent on real reforms and the democratisation of Azerbaijan, but not on the ones we recently heard about here during the progress report discussions.

In 2012, Azeri journalists working with the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) focused on Eastern Europe and Central Asia, reported that one of the four consortium members, Globex International LLP, was owned by Panamanian companies controlled by Aliyev’s daughters and a family friend. One of the OCCRP reporters was Azeri investigative journalist Khadija Ismayilova, also a member of ICIJ. Many of us know her and met her here, in the Council of Europe. In 2015, the Azeri authorities imprisoned Ismayilova in what is widely believed to have been an act of retaliation for her exposé of government corruption. The authorities charged Ismayilova with counts of embezzlement, illegal business, tax evasion, abuse of power and inciting a man to commit suicide. Her sentence: seven and a half years in prison.

The investigating journalists have done a great job, and today we, as the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, should unite to stamp out corruption and financial speculations. Consequently, I would suggest a parliamentary inquiry for our future work.