The Germans were caught lobbying the interests of Azerbaijan in the Council of Europe and ignoring human rights violations in the country in reports

PACE deputies are “on the payroll” of Ilham Aliyev

In Germany the prosecutor’s office brought charges V corruption against four people, including two ex-deputies of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), writes Investigace.cz. They are suspected of receiving bribes from the regime of the Azerbaijani autocrat Ilham Aliyev. In exchange for bribes, they had to support Baku in the Council of Europe and distort data in reports on human rights violations in the country.

Former PACE members Axel Fischer and Eduard Lintner were involved in “Azerbaijan Laundromat” is a massive lobbying and money laundering scheme that was exposed in 2017 by journalists from OCCRP and the Süddeutsche Zeitung.

In 2016 Axel Fischer received a bribe in the amount of 21,800 euros. He defended the interests of the Aliyev regime – for example, in January 2016, when voting on the war in Nagorno-Karabakh.

And companies Eduard Lintner between 2012 and 2014 received a total of 3.4 million euros. One of the payments, in the amount of 61 thousand euros, arrived in Lintner’s account two weeks after he returned from Azerbaijan, where he observed the presidential elections.

Ilham Aliyev has been consistently winning elections since 2003. In 2013, during the election events, a scandal erupted: people were shown the election results even before the polling stations opened. However, Lintner described the elections positively:

At the end of January 2024 PACE voted for expelling the Azerbaijani delegation, citing Azerbaijan’s failure to fulfill core obligations within twenty years of joining the Council and noting that “at least 18 journalists and media representatives are currently in custody.”

The Azerbaijani delegation expected such results and left the meeting several hours early.

But Azerbaijan continues to trade with Europe. The country remains one of the largest suppliers of oil and gas to the EU. In mid-2022 Azerbaijan signed an agreement with the European Union to double the volume of Azerbaijani gas supplies to the European Union by 2027.