Azerbaijan bought Tony Blair's knowledge and expertise.
In 2009, he gave a speech in Azerbaijan—for a price of nearly $150,000—to bless a new methanol plant. Rather than highlighting Baku’s backslide toward autocracy, Blair entirely ignored Azerbaijan’s rights clampdown at the time. In 2015, Blair spearheaded a PR project to promote a pipeline construction, the Trans-Anatolian Pipeline, to bring Azeri gas to southern Italy.
Journalists and human rights activists have been intensely harassed and savagely beaten. Political opposition stand imprisoned with little legal recourse.
SOYMB blog finds it as no great surprise that the ruling class of which Blair was so friendly with have been accused of corruption. Azerbaijan's ruling elite operated a secret $2.8bn (£2.2bn) slush fund for two years to pay off European politicians and make luxury purchases, investigation shows. The money was allegedly channelled through four UK-based opaque companies. People said to have been paid include European politicians who adopted a favourable attitude to the government. Much of the money was said to have been paid to lobbyists, journalists, politicians, and businessmen.
The secret fund, nicknamed the Azerbaijan Laundromat, operated for two years until 2014, according to the investigation, carried out by a consortium of European newspapers and published by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP). There was "ample evidence of its connection to the family of President Ilham Aliyev".
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