SOCAR’s Turab Musayev did have a controlling interest in Cifidex Ltd, emails uncovered by the Daphne Caruana Galizia Foundation show, despite denials and threats to media Mr Musayev issued through his London lawyers at Atkins Thomson: “Our client was not the controlling party of Cifidex or of [the Mozura] project”.
Offshore companies Cifidex Ltd and 17 Black Ltd are at the centre of a deal involving the purchase of a Mozura (Montenegro) windfarm by Malta’s state-owned Enemalta plc. Musayev represented Azerbaijan’s interest in Electrogas Malta Ltd, the energy company Daphne Caruana Galizia was investigating, the foundation said.
He was a business associate of Yorgen Fenech, the Electrogas shareholder and former director and 17 Black Ltd owner, who stands charged with commissioning Caruana Galizia’s murder. Musayev used Cifidex, a Seychelles company, to buy 99 per cent of the shares in Montenegro’s Mozura wind farm for €2.9m in 2015 and to sell them, two weeks later, to Enemalta plc for €10.3m. Cifidex purchased the wind farm shares with €3m borrowed from 17 Black Ltd, Fenech’s United Arab Emirates company.
After Cifidex sold the shares to Enemalta, the offshore company repaid the €3m to 17 Black plus an additional €4.6m “profit share”. The Daphne Caruana Galizia Foundation searched for all domains ever registered that contained the word “cifidex” and found cifidex.com and cifidexrenewables.com, which were registered between 2014 and 2018. Both domains’ registration had expired over two years ago.
The Foundation registered the two domains and set up automatic “catch-all” email forwarding for both. The set-up forwarded any email sent to any address linked to either domain directly to the Foundation. The Foundation then received automated weekly emails from an online backup service, reporting the status of a scheduled backup from the Gmail account of [email protected] to the OneDrive account of Turab Musayev (see image).
Although Musayev’s registration of the cifidex.com domain had expired, the automated reporting service kept running because it was installed to the cifidex.com G Suite account. G Suite is a set of services provided by Google that allows applications such as Gmail and Google Drive to be used with any domain. Once G Suite is set up with a domain, the account remains active and partially usable after the domain expires.
The automated weekly emails received by the Foundation provide documentary evidence that Musayev did have a controlling interest in Cifidex, the foundation said.
