Azerbaijan’s Prosecutor General’s Office has launched an investigation into ‘financial irregularities amounting to approximately ₼11 million ($6.5 million)’ in construction and renovation projects in the country’s second-largest city, Ganja.
The investigation was launched on Wednesday after an audit by the Chamber of Accounts.
The audit revealed that the cost of work on the Ganja Sports Palace project was inflated by ₼9.5 million ($5.6 million). An overpayment of ₼1.3 million ($765,000) was also discovered for a 249-apartment residential building. Furthermore, overpayments were detected for housing repairs, major road repairs, and landscaping.
‘During public procurement, construction code requirements were not met. The scope of work, as well as its cost, was inflated by over ₼144,000 ($85,000) in 2023 and over ₼258,000 ($150,000) in 2024, and contractors were overpaid’, the report read.
The report also found that work on the Ecological Park Complex in the city in 2024 and 2025 resulted in an overpayment ₼1.2 million ($710,000) and over ₼155,000 ($91,000) for road repairs.
During the road repairs, a total of over ₼252,000 ($148,000) was overpaid for six projects, as well as to the contractor behind the repairs.
The Chamber of Accounts noted that some of the overpayments were returned to the state budget, while in other cases, legal proceedings were ongoing.
The Prosecutor General’s Office has yet to provide any details regarding its investigation into the city’s spending.
According to the pro-government online newspaper Khalg, the head of the Ganja administration, Niyazi Bayramov, was on an official visit to Qingdao, China when the investigation was launched.
As part of his trip, Bayramov and his delegation visited the Alley of International Friendship in Qingdao on 21 April, where they planted a tree in honour of Ganja.
Bayramov was appointed to his position by a presidential decree in August 2018. Prior to this, from 2012 to 2018, he headed the Executive Authority of the city of Mingachevir. He is also a member of the ruling New Azerbaijan Party.
Bayramov has previously been the subject of corruption investigations, most notably when blogger Mehman Huseynov claimed in 2023 to have discovered that Niyazi Bayramov’s son, Bahram Bayramov, had amassed a collection of the cars worth around ₼2 million ($1.2 million).
The investigation into the city’s overspending is the latest in a series of corruption allegations leveled against local officials in recent years.
To date, nine local officials have been convicted of corruption and sentenced to prison terms ranging from seven to 12 years. All were members of the ruling party.
An independent economist has told OC Media on condition of anonymity that there is a lack of transparency regarding public procurement projects in Azerbaijan, and that a ‘lack of transparency eliminates the possibility of public oversight’.
‘If the state agencies acknowledge that there are public institutions monitoring tenders and that some of their fraud will immediately be exposed, become public and create a big scandal, they will avoid it’, the expert said. ‘Because the government has completely destroyed independent civil society and the media and created an information deficit, that is, we cannot get enough information about tenders’.
