SOCAR man controlled firm that used 17 Black cash to buy Montenegro wind farm

An email forwarding system set up by the Daphne Caruana Galizia Foundation allowed it to prove that Turab Musayev, a representative of Azebaijani state company SOCAR, had a controlling interest in the company at the centre of a corrupt deal for Enemalta to purchase a Montenegrin wind farm. 

Musayev is alleged having had a controlling interest in Cifidex Ltd, a Seychelles company that was used to acquire 99% of shares in Montenegro’s Mozura wind farm for €2.9 million in 2015 before it was sold just two weeks later to Enemalta plc for €10.3m. 

Cifidex was loaned €3 million from Yorgen Fenech’s Dubai-registered company 17 Black to be able to complete the Mozura purchase. After Cifidex sold the shares to Enemalta, the offshore company repaid the €3m to 17 Black plus an additional €4.6m “profit share”. 

Fenech, the alleged mastermind behind the Caruana Galizia assassination, is a part-owner in Electrogas, the consortium that includes SOCAR, which was a €200 million public tender to construct Malta’s gas plant – a Labour electoral pledge back in 2013. 

Despite denials and legal threats to the Maltese press, Musayev has been revealed to be clearly connected to Cifidex, the Daphne Caruana Galizia Foundation revealed. 

The 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. 

The automated status report of a scheduled backup dated 7 July 2020, sent from the Gmail account of [email protected] to the Microsoft OneDrive account of Turab Musayev.

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, and further evidence that Musayev and Fenech were part of an organisation that set out to defraud the Maltese public.