GENEVA (Public Radio of Armenia) — Having opened bank accounts with Credit Suisse, Barclays, and other foreign banks, Rza and Seymur Talibov received over $20 million in suspicious wire transfers, even as the people of the Azerbaijani exclave of Nakhichevan suffered under their father’s dictatorial rule according to an investigation by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) titled Suisse secrets with leaked banking data from the Swiss bank Credit Suisse.
Suisse Secrets is a collaborative journalism project based on leaked bank account data from Swiss banking giant Credit Suisse.
The data was provided by an anonymous source to the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, which shared it with the (Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project) OCCRP and 46 other media partners around the world.
In late 2007 19-year-old Seymur had $40,000 transferred to his personal bank account on December 27. On the same day, his 25-year-old brother Rza got $95,000 of his own. As an explanation, both transactions listed simply the word “textile.”
Within months, Seymur and Rza both started to receive more cash, in much larger bank transfers — up to $500,000 at a time, often in implausibly round figures. The listed reasons for the transfers expanded to include “metal,” “metal parts,” and “electrical equipment.” By the end of 2012, they had received over $20 million in total.
Now, through an analysis of several leaks of banking data and property records, OCCRP can show that the Talibov family enriched itself from questionable sources even as Nakhichevan’s people suffered.
