Manouchehr Ahadpour Khanghah is an Azerbaijani-Iranian businessman and the former chairman of the AZ Group, an Azerbaijani conglomerate with interests in plastics, wood, construction, farming, fish, and caviar.[554] [1187] [555] [341] His UAE company MIRK General Trading LLC acted as the property manager and rent collector for several luxury villas and hotels in Dubai jointly owned by Leyla and Arzu Aliyeva and the sons of Azerbaijan’s Emergency Situations Minister Kamaladdin Heydarov.[131] [341] Between 2015 and 2017, MIRK General Trading paid out a total of 36.3 million AED ($9.9 million) to bank accounts in Malta held by shell companies owned by the Aliyeva sisters.[341] [425] [426]
Details of these and other transactions were contained in the records of Malta’s Pilatus Bank,[341] which was shuttered in 2018 over systemic failures to comply with anti-money laundering regulations.[587] Investigators who trawled through the bank’s records discovered that Khanghah held a personal account at Emirates NBD, a government-controlled bank in Dubai, from which he sent 1 million euro to an account he held at Pilatus. He also transferred 3.7 million AED ($1 million) in January 2015 to another account at Pilatus belonging to Mulsanne Investment Limited, a Maltese holding company that Khanghah had registered for investment activity.[341] Investigators found that the only large debits made by the Mulsanne account were to an account owned by Silver Lake Family Office Limited, a Guernsey company, for “family office management” fees.[341] The family was not specified, but investigators ascertained that it was the Heydarov family.[341] A similarly named Guernsey company, Silverlake Investment Holdings Limited, which owned a Gulfstream private jet, was found to be jointly owned by Khanghah and—via a complicated trust structure that went from Guernsey to the Isle of Man to New Zealand—Tale and Nijat Heydarov,[341] Kamaladdin Heydarov’s sons. Indeed, Khanghah had previously been described in a leaked US diplomatic cable as the “front man” for the Heydarov family business, specifically in the context of an attempt by his sons to purchase a Gulfstream private jet.[553]
Khanghah has additional ties to the Heydarovs. Tale and Nijat Heydarov jointly owned Shams al Sahra FZCO, a Dubai company, until January 2021, when Nijat Heydarov’s half share was transferred to Khanghah.[8]
Manouchehr Ahadpur Khanghah did not respond to The Sentry’s request for comment.
