Seized golf course and home up for sale for £19.5m

A Berkshire golf club and Knightsbridge house forfeited by a jailed banker's wife have been put up for sale for a total of £19.5m.

Zamira Hajiyeva agreed to give up Mill Ride Golf Club in Ascot and the home, which is on the market for £14.75m, after a six-year National Crime Agency (NCA) fraud investigation.

It resulted in the UK's first unexplained wealth order and a trustee was appointed by the High Court to sell the assets in the autumn. Online adverts for them went live last month.

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 said last year it 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.

The golf club is on the market for £4.25m and was developed in the early 1990s.

The Walton Street home is a five-minute walk to Harrods, where Mrs Hajiyeva spent £16m in a decade, including £4.9m on jewellery.

An NCA spokesperson said last year that once the golf club and house are sold, 70% of the proceeds will be kept by the government and 30% returned to Mrs Hajiyeva.

A law firm working for Mrs Hajiyeva last year said she and her family were "happy to now be able to move on with their lives" and she had taken the decision "to settle the proceedings because it proved impossible to defend them".

Gherson LLP said: "Throughout the course of the UK proceedings, Mrs Hajiyeva's husband, who is detained in Azerbaijan, held information potentially crucial to the case.

"However, for the duration of the UK case, the Azerbaijani authorities deliberately denied Mrs Hajiyeva and her UK lawyers access to Mr Hajiyev in prison in Azerbaijan."

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