Golf club forfeited in wealth order has been sold

A Berkshire golf club forfeited by a jailed banker's wife has been sold, while a Knightsbridge townhouse she used to own has had its asking price cut by £1.25m.

Zamira Hajiyeva agreed to give up Mill Ride Golf Club in Ascot and the home, which has had its price reduced from £14.75m to £13.5m, following a six-year National Crime Agency (NCA) fraud investigation.

Members of the golf club have told the BBC that it has been bought by Maidenhead Golf Club, which was approached to comment.

Mrs Hajiyeva, who spent £16m at Harrods in a decade, is in line to keep 30% of the sales' proceeds, and the government will take 70%.

Mrs Hajiyeva's husband, Jahangir, was the chairman of the state-controlled International Bank of Azerbaijan from 2001 to 2015 and was later given a 16-year jail sentence for fraud and embezzlement.

The NCA said last year it believed the golf club and house were obtained as a "direct result of large-scale fraud and embezzlement, false accounting and money laundering".

It said it had found "no reasonable explanation" for the source of funds used to buy both of them.

The golf course was developed in the 1990s. The club's website shows that it is not accepting any new members and that it has a waiting list in place.

The Walton Street home is a five-minute walk from Harrods, where Mrs Hajiyeva's lavish spending included shelling out £4.9m on jewellery.

A law firm working for Mrs Hajiyeva last year said she and her family were "happy to now be able to move on with their lives" and she had taken the decision "to settle the proceedings because it proved impossible to defend them".

Gherson LLP said: "Throughout the course of the UK proceedings, Mrs Hajiyeva's husband, who is detained in Azerbaijan, held information potentially crucial to the case.

"However, for the duration of the UK case, the Azerbaijani authorities deliberately denied Mrs Hajiyeva and her UK lawyers access to Mr Hajiyev in prison in Azerbaijan."

Maidenhead Golf Club is set to need to move from its current course after plans to build 1,500 homes on it were given permission in February.

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