Despite the illusion of transparency, water supply in Azerbaijan’s Nardaran district shows high levels of corruption and state interference.
‘In Nardaran, we see water in only two seasons of the year. Only at the end of October do we get drinkable water. This continues until March, but during the hot spring and summer months, we have only our well water for drinking’, a local resident, who asked to remain anonymous due to security concerns, tells OC Media.
Located within Nardaran is the famous Sea Breeze project created by Emin Aghalarov, an Azerbaijani-Russian businessperson and pop star who decided to build a resort and residential housing complex in the shape of a cruise liner along the shore of the Caspian Sea. Aghalarov is directly connected to Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, having been married to Aliyev’s daughter, Leyla Aliyeva, from 2005 to 2015. The couple have two children.
Given the high-profile nature of the project, Nardaran residents could not understand why drinkable water consistently disappeared every spring and summer, especially given that money was being spent from the state budget annually to provide water to the resort.
However, public procurement documents show that rather than fulfilling the water needs of the resort and its surroundings, funding has instead been transferred to family members of officials or their close associates, leaving local residents out to dry.
The mirage of a fair public procurement
Public procurement documents from 2023–2024 show that three companies — Nardaran Invest LLC, the Euro-Asian Construction Corporation EVRASCON OJSC, and the Turkish Eren Construction Industry and Trade Joint Stock Company — implemented a project to construct the Jeyranbatan–Mashtaga–Nardaran water pipeline along with a reservoir on behalf of the state agency Azersu, which is in charge of organising state policy and strategy in regards to water supply and sanitation services. The amount of the tender was around ₼25 million ($15 million).
At the same time, a second project was also announced to build a waste management plant. According to public procurement records, ₼15 million ($8.8 million) from the state budget allocated to the Sea Breeze resort was paid to the same three companies used to construct the Pirshaghi–Bilga sewage collection plant.
According to data from the Azerbaijani Tax Ministry, the juridical address of Sea Breeze matches that of one of the construction companies, Nardaran Invest LLC. The person in charge of the company, however, is listed as Jamila Aghalarova, a likely relative of Emil Aghalarov’s, though the direct connection is unknown.
The chair of the Board of Directors of the Euro-Asian Construction Corporation EVRASCON OJSC, Hamzat Ismiyev Ismayil-Afandiyevich, also has a connection to Sea Breeze — he is listed as belonging to the Sea Breeze Energy company, one of the offshoots of the main Sea Breeze project owned by Aghalarov.
According to Azerbaijan’s Law of Public Procurement, ‘suppliers shall not be allowed to participate in procurement in the following cases if the supplier has a legal, financial, or organisational dependence on the procuring entity or the procuring entity and the supplier have the same legal entity; one of the suppliers is the beneficial owner of the other, or at least two suppliers are controlled by the same beneficial owner; if one of the suppliers is a member and/or participant of the management body of the other, or if the member and/or a participant of the management body of at least two of the suppliers is the same person’.
While on paper the procurement was won by the three above-mentioned companies, only the Euro-Asian Construction Corporation, EVRASCON OJSC, along with a fourth company known as Ensol LLC, actually implemented the construction of the water pipeline.
When OC Media asked why different companies were involved in the construction process than were listed in the public procurement documents, Azersu responded that winning companies are free to choose any contracting companies. Even so, according to Azerbaijani law, all companies involved in state-funded projects should be publicly listed.
OC Media also reached out to Ensol LLC and the Euro-Asian Construction Corporation EVRASCON OJSC, but has not received a response as of publication.
Separately, the ability to supply the materials, equipment, and licenses required for the ultrafilter water treatment plant provided by Azersu was won by Maybo LLC for an amount of ₼1.7 million ($970,000).
The legal owner of Maybo LLC is Musayev Araz Sovet, while a sister company, Maybo Calibration LLC, is owned by Midhat Gurbanaliyev. Gurbanaliyev’s father, Chingiz Gurbanaliyev, was honoured by Aliyev in 2014 for his ‘contribution to the socio-cultural development of Ganja’.
When OC Media contacted Chingiz Gurbanaliyev to clarify what standards his son’s company followed and how they followed the government’s procurement regulations, he responded that ‘if my son needs anything, he will call you back’.
No further attempts to contact either Chingiz Gurbanaliyev or his son Midhat were successful.
‘It is simply abuse, corruption’
Lawyer Akram Hasanov tells OC Media that in Azerbaijan, as a rule, public procurement is carried out ‘according to a pre-agreed scenario’.
‘Very rarely, and precisely for such a small amount, or in conditions of unemployment, when no one wants to do this, real tenders are held’, he says.
Hasanov emphasises that though the law on public procurement was amended two years ago, there are still many gaps and problems.
‘Government agencies still do not comply with them. And, of course, this law does not establish liability. That is, liability occurs under a criminal article or something similar’, Hasanov says, emphasising that a state tender should be held exclusively for ‘state needs’.
‘Of course, this should be in the sphere of state affairs. If this is the case, then it is simply abuse, corruption. This needs to be dealt with and sorted out’, Hasanov says.
A separate expert, who wished not to be named due to safety concerns, believes that if the government did not want corruption, ‘it should be interested in disclosing the reports and financial statements of its four companies, at least for six months, for three months. And the finances should have been transparent. Everyone should have known that what they were doing was supposed to be public procurement and competition’.
‘The most important thing is that the biggest problem with our state-owned companies is the lack of transparency, there is no transparent pricing environment, there is no public oversight, there is no effective system of state oversight. And we couldn’t say how much money was invested, and if this money was spent efficiently’, he added.
‘In other words, the problem with state-owned companies is not the lack of information. It also depends on the presentation of expenses. It is also about exaggerating costs’.
Besides winning the public tenders, Nardaran Invest also played a role in hosting the UN’s COP29 climate summit in Baku from 11–22 November 2024.
In March 2024, the chair of Azerbaijan’s Small and Medium Business Agency, Orkhan Mammadov, wrote on X that the ‘next incentive document for strategic investment projects’ had been issued to Nadaran Invest LLC to create a ‘hospitality project’ within the framework of COP29. The project was supposed to invest around ₼1 billion ($590 million) into the economy and employ around 3,000 people.
Aghalarov made sure to thank Aliyev for supporting his business, noting that Sea Breeze would house up to 5,000 guests as part of COP29.
No clean drinking water for 30 years
According to the state agency, the Unified Water Supply Service of Large Cities, ‘the recently implemented Nardaran Reservoir project will help provide centralised drinking water to coastal areas, as well as residential and garden areas. Of course, since Sea Breeze is located in the Nardaran area, this area will also be able to be supplied with water from the centralised water supply network’.
The agency highlighted that the project was designed to improve the drinking water supply of the entire north-eastern part of the Absheron Peninsula, ‘especially the coastal areas of the villages of Mashtagha, Nardaran, and Bilgah, as well as newly built residential areas’.
Despite the construction work, local residents say nothing has changed — for 30 years, they have failed to receive adequate drinking water. Indeed, due to the poor water quality, homemade water purification devices are widely used by local residents.
‘For purifying water, we manually created a water purifier from a plastic bottle. I cut the plastic bottle in the middle and pierced the lid. Then I put cotton in the hole of the lid. And we change this cotton piece after several days. The colour of the cotton turns nearly black’, one local resident told OC Media.
According to the Unified Water Supply Service of Large Cities, water quality tests, which are conducted by 12 chemical and bacteriological analysis laboratories, are in place to determine the quality and safety of water from the source to the consumer.
The current state standard for the quality of purified drinking water only came into force in 2023 — prior to this, drinking water quality control in Azerbaijan was carried out on the basis of standards adopted by the Soviet Union.
According to the new standard, microbiological, physical-chemical, and radiological indicators will be studied; it received a positive opinion from the relevant state, scientific, and civil society institutions.
Yet, according to a Gazakh resident, who wished to remain unnamed, they choose not to use the water supplied by Azersu due to its poor quality.
‘We’re taking our water from the Armenian side’s reservoir, because this water is of higher quality than was supplied by Azersu,’ they told OC Media.
‘This water was not suitable for drinking or irrigation. Once we were watering our garden, but it was bad, and our trees dried up. After that, we decided not to use this water for drinking and watering the gardens’.
The Gazakh resident noted that the sewage system in the village was installed in 1984, leading the residents to instead get their drinking water from the Armenian Jogazchay (Joghaz) reservoir.
‘The village of Garapapag is located on the border with Armenia. And natural water comes to them from the forest, from a spring’, he says, noting that the villagers prefer this water for drinking because of its purity.
A long history of corruption and scandal
Looking beyond his various construction projects in Azerbaijan, Aghalarov and his father Aras have garnered significant attention in the West, namely due to the involvement of Emin in the so-called ‘Russiagate’ scandal in 2016 involving alleged illegal Russian collusion with the presidential campaign of Donald Trump.
Through his publicist Rob Goldstone, Emin Aghalarov helped arrange the now-infamous meeting at Trump Tower in 2016 between Donald Trump Jr., his son-in-law Jared Kushner, former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort, and Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya. At the meeting, Trump Jr. and others were reportedly promised compromising information about Hillary Clinton, who was at the time the leading Democratic nominee for president — the meeting became central to the lengthy investigation into the Trump campaign by Special Counsel Robert Mueller and has continued to be one of Trump’s primary conspiracy-tinged fixations.
While the Trump Tower meeting was the most high-profile illustration of the connection between Trump and the Aghalarovs — both father and son — it was not the first.
Their friendship reportedly dates back to a Miss Universe Pageant in Las Vegas 2013, attended by both the Aghalarov’s and Trump, where they discussed holding another pageant in Moscow later that year.
Trump and the Aghalarovs then signed a multi-million dollar deal, according to sources, and Trump traveled to Russia to ‘bring’ the pageant to Moscow.
During his trip, Trump also had a cameo role in a music video for Emin Aghalarov’s song, ‘In Another Life’.
The Aghalarovs and Trump remained friendly, and Emin reportedly tried to broker a personal meeting between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2014, but the meeting never came to fruition.
Following the scandal and investigations surrounding the Trump Tower meeting, the Aghalarov’s stepped back from their public relationship with Trump, which was bringing undue attention to their businesses.
With the investigation remaining in the headlines, Emin Aghalarov cancelled his planned North America concert tour in 2019.
In a comment to BBC News, Aghalarov cited the possibility that he could be summoned for questioning as the reason the tour was cancelled, blaming ‘the inability of the other side to guarantee that I will be able to leave the USA before the investigation is over’.
‘The investigation has been going on for over a year’, he said. ‘It could be going on for years from now. And I’m not able to stay on US soil for unlimited time because of the obligations I have for my tours and other events that I have planned for this year’.
The Aghalarovs, particularly Aras, have maintained close connections with Putin and the Kremlin, and have been sanctioned in relation to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
