The owner of Mill Ride Golf Club in Berkshire has been forced to forfeit the asset after the High Court ruled that the money used to purchase the club in 2013 was obtained from fraudulent activities.
Zamira Hajiyeva is the subject of the UK’s first ever Unexplained Wealth Order (UWO) relating to a London house and the Ascot-based golf club, which were recently jointly valued at £26.5 million, that she is deemed to own.
Despite the court deciding the properties were paid for using illicit funds, it did not make any finding on whether Mrs Hajiyeva knew where the money came from.
Hajiyeva, 60, is the wife of Jahangir Hajiyev, the former chairman of the state-owned International Bank of Azerbaijan, who is currently serving a 15-year jail sentence for defrauding the bank out of up to £2.2bn. He was jailed in 2016.
Hajiyeva lost a High Court challenge to one unexplained wealth order that relates to a five-bedroom house in central London that she bought for £11.5 million in 2009 through a company registered in the British Virgin Islands. She has now been served with a second unexplained wealth order on Mill Ride Golf Club, which was bought in 2013 for £10.5 million.
CLUB TO BE SOLD AT AUCTION, BUT REMAINS OPEN
A spokesperson for the UK’s National Crime Agency said: “The purchase of the golf club was conducted through a complex structure of Luxembourg and Guernsey-registered companies, and by using offshore trusts in Guernsey and later, Cyprus.”
The NCA applied for a freezing order for the two properties in March 2021 and a civil recovery order in June 2023. Both assets will now be sold at auction.
The government will get 70% of the proceeds, minus the NCA’s costs, with the remainder restored to Hajiyeva under the terms of a settlement agreement. The actual amount recovered will depend on what the assets are sold for.
Mill Ride continues to operate as normal, with most members unaware of the details of the club’s owner, who has never visited the club and does not play golf.
Mill Ride opened in 1990 and boasts an 18-hole, 6,861-yard parkland course designed by Donald Steel. It appeared in several UK Top 100 Courses list when it was first built and has hosted numerous professional tournaments over the years.
The club’s website says that it currently has no waiting list for membership and does not charge a joining fee. A visitor green fee on weekdays is £55, rising to £70 at weekends.
The club has changed hands several times in its 34-year history. Its original developers were unable to make a commercial success of the venture, and it was eventually sold by Barclays Bank to Lazian Ltd, whose main shareholders was an Indonesian businessman.
Lazian sold the club to The Country Club Group in 2003, which ran it for ten years before selling it on for £10.5 million to Jeffrey & Hillary UK Ltd, a Reading-based company whose majority shareholder is Chinese businessman Jeffrey Chao, chairman of IT networking giants TP-Link.
It is not clear at what point Hajiyeva took over the ownership, or whether she was part of the consortium that put together the bid.
Lawyers action for Hajiyeva said: “The settlement involved no finding of fact by the court about our client’s knowledge, still less involvement, in relation to these properties.”
They said Hajiyeva had settled the proceedings because it had been “impossible to defend them” due to the inability to obtain documents that were “potentially crucial to the case” from her husband during his imprisonment in Azerbaijan.