Javad Marandi is a British-Iranian businessman with investments in property, restaurants, and fashion stores in the UK and France and extensive business ties to Azerbaijan.[565] [566]
He is an associate of Azerbaijan’s ruling Aliyev family,[565] including Leyla Aliyeva, with whom he has been photographed.[1188] He has reportedly supported her cultural endeavors,[567] including by founding a UK company for the production of “Ali and Nino,”[234] a 2016 feature film produced by Leyla Aliyeva.[568] [569] He has worked as a consultant for PASHA Construction,[565] a subsidiary of PASHA Holding, a major Azerbaijani conglomerate majority owned by Leyla and Arzu Aliyeva since 2013.[528] [1336] [1112] [1270] [341] In 2016, Marandi planned to sell the sisters a property in London in a 60 million GBP ($90 million) deal.[570] [461] [979] The deal never went through, but as part of it, he introduced the sisters to Child & Child, a British law firm.[570] [461] Separately, he instructed the law firm to “gift” a London apartment to Mir Jamal Pashayev, a cousin of Azerbaijan’s first lady, Vice President Mehriban Aliyeva.[570] [461]
Marandi is a director of Dokta MMC,[567] an Azerbaijani drugstore chain.[572] [573] His business partner in Dokta is Javanshir Feyziyev,[567] a serving member of the Azerbaijani Parliament whose family had 5.6 million GBP ($7.5 million) seized by a court in London in 2022 after an investigation into money laundering by the UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA).[574] [1399] In 2023, Marandi was identified by a high court judge in London as a “person of importance” in Feyziyev’s case.[575] Investigators from the NCA found that Marandi and Feyziyev had received large and suspicious payments from the “Azerbaijani Laundromat,”[575] a $2.9 billion alleged money laundering scheme uncovered in 2017 by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project.[576] NCA investigators found that two of the core companies in the laundromat had paid large sums to Avromed Company, a Seychelles company beneficially owned by Marandi.[575] [577] Between 2005 and 2017, Avromed is alleged to have paid out more than $150 million to Marandi, both directly and via the account of a British Virgin Islands company he owned.[575] [577] Marandi denies all wrongdoing, as do Feyziyev and his family, and the NCA can “neither confirm nor deny” that Marandi is under investigation.[575] [577]
Meanwhile, Marandi is linked to the MIRK group of companies, which includes the rent collector and manager of Leyla and Arzu Aliyeva’s property assets in Dubai,[341] including their five-star Sofitel hotel.[551] Specifically, Marandi is named as an owner of an apartment in Dubai that, on property records obtained by C4ADS, gives its contact address as a MIRK group email address.[239]
Marandi’s business portfolio includes ownership of the Sofitel franchise in Brussels,[579] as well as Azerbaijan’s McDonald’s franchise.[566] After the fall of the Soviet Union, Marandi started selling cigarettes in Azerbaijan, initially working as regional director for Phillip Morris,[567] before distributing for Imperial Tobacco, British American Tobacco, and Japan Tobacco, reportedly moving 100 containers a month.[566]
Javad Marandi did not respond to The Sentry’s request for comment.
