Leaders of organized criminal groups, dictators who steal from their people, crooked officials, and other shady characters have become adept at hiding their millions in Western capitals.

occrp.org/en/what-is-une…
via @OCCRP
But there’s one sector where the corruption takes physical form, turning cities like London into virtual showcases of tainted foreign wealth: Real estate.
Sherlock's iconic address on Baker Street is owned by structures connected to the daughter of former Kazakhstani dictator
In stately and elegant Belgrave Square sits a ten-bedroom mansion belonging to a Ukrainian oligarch who is accused of stealing billions from a bank he owned.
Thanks in part to repeated journalistic exposés, pressure has been growing for law enforcement to take a harder line against corrupt foreigners.
One new mechanism, introduced with some fanfare in the United Kingdom in 2018, is the unexplained wealth order (UWO). This procedure allows the country’s investigators to require that the owners of suspiciously large assets show how they paid for them.
In January 2021, Zamira Hajiyeva, the wife of a jailed #Azerbaijan |i banker, lost a Supreme Court appeal against the first UWO ever issued, and will now have to justify to investigators her purchase of two luxury properties.

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More from @arzugeybulla

1 May
Azerbaijan's Minister of Youth and Sports, Azad Rahimov dies after ongoing cancer treatment in the US acc. to @AzadliqRadiosu

His career was marred with human rights violations and corruption.

Here is a thread on his so-called achievements and murky business deals.
In April 2020, @OCCRP published an investigation into a company named SerbAz. The company reportedly brought more than 700 workers from the Balkan region to Baku for construction and renovation work of some its most prominent buildings between 2006 and 2009.
The investigation revealed that SerbAz’s most powerful backer in the country was Minister of Youth and Sports Azad Rahimov. According to the OCCRP, there was strong evidence that the minister awarded contracts to his wife’s company, using public money to benefit his own family.
Read 10 tweets
29 Apr
Wrote a little something about the rise and fall of #Clubhouse in #Turkey for @globalvoices

globalvoices.org/2021/04/29/the…
In January, when students of Turkey's prestigious Boğaziçi University launched protests against a president-appointed rector, Clubhouse was one of the places where much of the conversation about the movement was taking place.
In a country as polarized as Turkey, and where much of the media is under government control, Clubhouse's rise to popularity was not surprising.
Read 4 tweets
27 Apr
Georgians’ collective memory has been shaped by pride in their struggle for independence since 1989 and fear of existential threats. This narrative has overshadowed other domestic challenges and increased Georgia’s reliance on individual leaders.
carnegieeurope.eu/2021/04/27/str…
Georgians are proud to see their country as an established democracy. Yet, thirty years on, the mainstream historical narrative still portrays the country as vulnerable and facing existential threats to its statehood.
Change is necessary, yet experience has proved that replacing a leader without altering policy only temporarily eases the situation and, in the longer run, fosters a sense of frustration and polarization in society.
Read 9 tweets
25 Apr
Even if a machine learning classifier can give a numeric probability on how likely a piece of content is to be toxic or harassing, it’s not clear what should be done with that prediction, particularly given the inevitability of bias or error. wired.co.uk/article/social…
Setting a platform-wide bar for “quality” that is too high will screen out too many things that are actually OK, and setting it too low will permit too many problematic things to pass.
This entire framing of the problem of “content moderation” is flawed. Someone’s experience on a platform is much more than the abuse-likelihood score of each piece of content they see. It is affected by every feature and design choice
Read 9 tweets
12 Mar
Long 🧵on Azerbaijan’s murky gold mining business explained as the news of AzerGold state company exploring partnership with Turkey’s Cengiz Holding for mining.

#Azerbaijan #corruption
In 2006 Pres. Aliyev awarded a  consortium of 6 goldfields worth billions of $ to one company in the UK & 3 in offshore jurisdictions: Globex International LLP, Londex Resources S.A., Willy & Meyris S.A. and Fargate Mining Corporation.

occrp.org/en/panamapaper…
A 2012 investigation by @RFERL & @OCCRP showed the president’s daughters, Leyla & Arzu Aliyeva were behind Globex International LLP which owned 11% of the consortium.
Read 24 tweets

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