July 2025
“Kleptocrats never work alone. They require a team of facilitators willing to move, hide, and administer their ill-gotten gains. As key cogs in the kleptocratic machine, these facilitators must be the target of enhanced scrutiny and action from both the public and private sector. Target the enablers, and we can make a real dent in the finely honed craft of state theft.”
– Oliver Windridge, Senior Advisor, UK & EU, The Sentry
In our work to map the maze of enablers and shadowy business networks linked to Azerbaijan’s kleptocratic regime, The Sentry has collaborated with Forbidden Stories to expose new information detailing a previously unknown connection.
Ginette Louise Blondel is a financial advisor based in a UK offshore jurisdiction, the island of Guernsey, who was sanctioned in March 2024 by the Guernsey Financial Services Commission for operating without a license. Blondel performed management and administrative services for clients considered “high-risk.” In its decision, the Commission anonymized the names of Blondel’s clients and left only a few clues about a “politically exposed family … with close ties to the ruling family in that jurisdiction.”
Forbidden Stories and The Sentry have uncovered the identity of this mysterious client: It is the family office of the Heydarovs, a powerful family in Azerbaijan linked to the Azerbaijani regime.
Blondel is a prime example of the offshore facilitators who enable questionable clients to quietly manage their assets despite mounting regulatory scrutiny. Our investigation with Forbidden Stories spotlights pieces in a complex puzzle of intersecting people, places, properties, and events—from a Maltese bank, to a luxury villa in a Spanish resort town, to the car bomb murder of an investigative journalist.
Read the article: https://forbiddenstories.org/daphne-project-azerbaijani-oligarch/
Plus:
- Are you a journalist, law enforcement agent, or researcher? Dive into the data and map the networks with our interactive Atlas project “Aliyev Empire”: https://atlas.thesentry.org/azerbaijan-aliyev-empire/
- Read The Sentry’s report “Azerbaijan’s Enablers” to learn more about the central players and transnational networks that helped construct a kleptocracy: https://thesentry.org/reports/azerbaijan-enablers/
Meet our collaborator on this recent project, Forbidden Stories, and discover more about its important role protecting the work of threatened journalists and pursuing the investigations of reporters who have been silenced: https://forbiddenstories.org/