Swiss Bank Quizzed Over Links To Azerbaijan’s Ruling Family

· April 14, 2025

OCCRP

How a Swiss private bank Reyl Intesa Sanpaolo courted a roster of questionable clients linked to autocratic regimes and corruption.

As part of its anti-money laundering investigations, Swiss bank regulator FINMA homed in on a Swiss asset manager called Olivier Mestelan, a customer at Reyl who had longstanding financial ties to the family of Azerbaijan’s authoritarian president Ilham Aliyev.

Aliyev has been in power since succeeding his father, Heydar Aliyev, in 2003 and has continued a brutal crackdown on dissent while his family has become stupendously wealthy.

Khadija Ismayilova, an Azerbaijani investigative journalist, was jailed in 2015 on what many observers regarded as politically motivated corruption charges. Ismayilova had written a series of stories with OCCRP and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in 2011 and 2012 revealing how Aliyev’s daughters directed several offshore companies that held stakes in a lucrative gold mine and a major telecommunications company in Azerbaijan.

Credit: PA Images/Alamy Stock Photo

Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev.

The reporting named Mestelan as a co-director in those offshore companies. A classified U.S. government cable sent from Washington, D.C., to Baku in 2010, later published by whistleblower group Wikileaks, described Mestelan as a “top Azerbaijani official.”

In January 2024, FINMA instructed Reyl to disclose any ties it had with Mestelan, as well as any relationships “with a link to Azerbaijan.”

Reyl told FINMA it had a business relationship with Mestelan’s Swiss asset management firm, Privaxis Services S.A., which Reyl classified as high-risk “because of his links with the ruling family in Azerbaijan.”

Reyl also told FINMA that it acted as custodian to two investment funds managing assets worth 413 million Swiss francs ($483 million) as of December 2023. One of the funds’ institutional subscribers, Reyl said, was Banca Privada d’Andorra, a private Andorran bank that has been in liquidation since U.S. prosecutors declared it a “financial institution of primary money laundering concern” in 2015.

According to the correspondence, the Andorran bank acted as a nominee subscriber for the funds’ underlying investors, whom Reyl described as “Azerbaijani persons, some of which were connected to the ruling family in Azerbaijan. Mr. Mestelan personally was also listed as an underlying subscriber.” (Reyl did not name the funds or identify their other underlying investors in the correspondence).

But although FINMA had asked Reyl to disclose all of its links to Mestelan, Reyl did not mention in the correspondence obtained by OCCRP that its asset management subsidiary had co-founded a Maltese investment company with Mestelan in 2010.

That investment company, initially called Privaxis Umbrella Fund Sicav Plc (later renamed Aladdin Umbrella Fund), had a sub-fund that held $30 million in deposits at the state-owned International Bank of Azerbaijan as of 2011, according to its annual report.

One of the Maltese company’s directors, Philippe Houman, was convicted of money laundering in France alongside François Reyl in 2016. The company was liquidated later that year. Neither Mestelan nor Houman responded to requests for comment.