On November 28, Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev signed an order to dismantle the State Customs Committee of Nakhchivan, which is Autonomous Republic under Azerbaijani rule. According to the same order, new Nakhchivan Main Customs Department has been created under Azerbaijan’s State Customs Committee.
The new decision follows an arrest of a senior Nakhchivani customs official by Azerbaijan’s State Security Service (SSS) on charges of embezzlement. On November 24, Mansur Asgarov, the head of the Customs Tariff Regulation and Payments Department of Nakhchivan’s now-dismissed State Customs Committee, was sentenced to four-month pre-trial arrest by a Baku court.
SSS said in a statement that the Customs Committee had “used fraudulent accounting to embezzle more than ₼100 million ($59 million).”
Azerbaijan’s political opposition approached the arrest news skeptically.
When you hear this information, you ask yourself if one head of the customs committee in Nakhchivan managed to steal so much public property, how many billion manats were stolen in the Azerbaijan Customs Committee as a whole? If the people’s money stolen in just one committee is calculated in billions of manats, how much public money is stolen in countless ministries and committees, in the government as a whole?
Ali Karimli, Chair of Popular Front Party
