As for Anar Madatli, Etibar Eyyub (aka Akin Koçak), and Talat Safarov, who have been sanctioned by the European Union, they are longtime heroes of the Cheka-OGPU and Rucriminal.info. They own a network of shadowy Azerbaijani oil traders who trade Russian oil in defiance of sanctions. The network remains closely linked to the Azerbaijani state oil company SOCAR – Russian sanctioned oil is sold by current SOCAR employees, and supplies are handled through the state-owned company's subsidiaries.

 

In addition to the five already well-known figures of Coral Energy, led by Tahir Garayev and Etibar Eyyub, it includes a number of former SOCAR employees, as well as Georgian, Arab, Hungarian, and Swiss companies. It is headed by Azerbaijani citizen Rovshan Tamrazov. He trades crude oil in the markets of the Caspian, Black, and Baltic Seas, as well as other regions. Rovshan Tamrazov, a native of Azerbaijan, attended the same school as Adnan Ahmadzade, the deputy head of SOCAR's investment department and a lover of luxury goods, luxury cars, and collectible watches. Ahmadzade was arrested a couple of months ago and is currently in jail on charges of undermining Azerbaijan's economic security and grand theft.

It is said that Rovshan Tamrazov's reckless financial schemes and lifestyle overwhelmed his cover at SOCAR, Adnan Ahmadzade, and in 2016, he exiled his old acquaintance from Europe to the UAE and India. Tamrazov's replacement in the Swiss office was Mariam Almaszade, said to be a classmate of Elshad Nasirov, SOCAR's vice president. She is a citizen of both Azerbaijan and Switzerland. It's no surprise that she now heads SOCAR's Geneva office. It was she who brought Nubar Aliyeva into the scheme—an old close friend of hers.

 

Tamrazov's network also became embroiled in international crime with the murder of a journalist. Until 2015, Mariam Almaszadeh, from Switzerland, managed a company called Crowbar Holdings S.A., registered in the British Virgin Islands. This company owned shares in Maddox Energy Trading Ltd., and Rovshan Tamrazov was said to be the beneficiary of Crowbar itself. On November 24, 2015, Crowbar transferred €2.3 million to Fenech's 17 Black, a company owned by criminal businessman Yorgen Fenech. The Maltese businessman was accused of involvement in the murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia, a 53-year-old Maltese journalist investigating government corruption. Fenech never disclosed the purpose of the payment.

 

In recent years, the leadership of MADDOX's Geneva office has changed several times. Its current president is Michel Bussard, a native Swiss, and its director with signatory authority is 52-year-old Liana Vachnadze, a graduate of the Moscow Aviation Institute and former employee of KPMG's Russian branch. Liana also appears in the Pandora Papers, the largest leak of secret offshore schemes, as the company CHALDON INVESTMENTS GROUP LIMITED is registered to her. In Moscow, until 2018, she was also a co-owner of the consulting firm Fopro Consulting, and her partners included Alexander Malkov and Denis Ryabchenko, who now own Beterra, a top-10 audit and consulting firm in Russia. Her clients include representatives from the oil and gas and mechanical engineering industries.

Rovshan Tamrazov's network, through Dubai-based MADDOX DMCC, also includes the Georgian companies Madoks Georgia Ltd., headed by director Seymur Aliyev (registered in 2019 in Tbilisi), and Sesole Proprietorur Alievi.

 

The Azerbaijani traders are not separate legal entities, but segments of a single network. They act in concert and unite to implement major projects. For example, in 2021, Tamrazov's Maddox DMCC acted as the primary lender in the deal of another "shadow" oil trader, Savannah Energy, to acquire ExxonMobil and Petronas assets in Chad and Cameroon for $600 million. Savannah is also owned by Turab Musayev, a former head of SOCAR Trading and a former employee of SOCAR.

 

As previously reported by VChK-OGPU and Rucriminal.info, almost all of the sanctioned individuals hold Russian passports: Etibar Eyyub, Tahir Garayev, Anar Madatli, Akhmed Kerimov, and Talat Safarov.

 

Their organizations control at least 100 vessels transporting Russian oil through shell companies. Here are just a few: Gatik Ship Management, Gaurik Ship Management, and Buena Vista Shipping.

 

The traders are closely connected to Azerbaijan's elite. Garayev, Madatli, and Safarov are the same age, originally from Nakhchivan, and members of the "golden youth" of the late 1990s. Anar Madatli is the son of Eynulla Madatli, former Azerbaijani ambassador to Ukraine. The ambassador was named "Ambassador of the Year" in 2014, but then fell into disgrace and was recalled from his post in 2015 after his son, Anar, was fired for "liking" a critical comment on social media. At the time, the younger Madatli was working at the Azerbaijani Embassy in Belgium. His older brother, Akper Madatli, was a top manager at Ateshgah Insurance, a major insurance company in Azerbaijan. Talat Safarov was then chairman of the board at Ateshgah, and the Azerbaijani state oil company SOCAR held a stake in the insurer. Unsurprisingly, the trader Coral quickly established ties with SOCAR and supplied oil to its Star refinery in Turkey.

Etibar Eyyub is the eldest of the group. He is linked to Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin, and it appears their business relationship began long ago and has since blossomed into a friendship. At Coral Energy, Etibar serves as an advisor and liaison with Rosneft. However, he, too, has some offshore secrets: back in 2015, he acquired a company in the Seychelles, MARINE INS LTD. It was featured in one of the largest legal document leaks of the 21st century, the Pandora Papers. Eyyub regularly flies to Tashkent and Minsk, establishing connections for the oil trading business.

 

By 2020, Coral was already busily transporting fuel oil purchased from Rosneft from the Black Sea port, acquiring products from the Belarusian state-owned oil refinery BNK, expanding into Israel, India, and African countries, and gradually building a structure with a command center in Switzerland. There, Coral Energy's top managers registered several companies, including Polar Energy at 7 Rue de l'Arquebuse in Geneva—the same contact address Tahir Garayev used when registering his company in the UK, and the Swiss company Coral Energy was also registered there.

Garayev's group also operated in Latvia, where their representative was a certain Jurius Sokolovs (who left the company in 2023). In Riga, in 2018, the group acquired Venta Energy Services, a company providing financial and consulting services to businesses, and in 2019, registered its representative office, also in Switzerland. The company is affiliated with Polar Energy SA and cites its address (7 Rue de l'Arquebuse) in its Swiss documentation. Furthermore, Akhmed Keremoff has served on the Riga company's board of directors since 2018. He was also a prominent figure in Azerbaijan when he joined Garayev's group. The head of risk management at Azercell Telecom, a member of the board of directors of a major cement producer, NORM LLC, and an advisor to the CEO of Azerbaijan's leading corporate bank, PASHA Bank, he lives in Switzerland and is responsible for the financial aspects of Garayev's group. For example, about a year ago, Kerimov attended a small event at Arab Bank (Switzerland) Ltd. and thanked its top managers for their collaboration. By that time, it was already known that Coral Energy and a group of Azerbaijani businessmen associated with it were trading Russian oil from Sechin, circumventing sanctions.

Terrene Energy is another active Dubai company affiliated with Garayev's group and registered at the same UAE address as Coral. It specializes in India, Turkey, and Russia.

The billions earned from sanctioned oil enabled the group's management to live lavishly. Garayev, for example, changed cars in Moscow like gloves – his garage has everything: Audi, BMW, Lexus, Mercedes, Bentley. He's flown to Switzerland over 90 times in recent years, and used his Swiss phone number hardly more often than his Russian ones. However, these trips weren't always connected to corporate interests: for example, Etibar Eyyoub acquired land in Switzerland and intended to build a family villa on "Billionaires' Hill," not far from the palace of Frenchman Jean-Pierre Valentini, the former leader of the oil company Trafigura, from whom Garayev's Nord Axis bought shares in Vostok Oil (a Rosneft project) in 2022. However, sanctions reportedly cut off Etibar's bank accounts, leaving him with no way to pay his workers, which is why his property remains an overgrown vacant lot.

To be continued