I don’t often find myself loitering outside of court buildings but I couldn’t resist wandering down to the U.K. High Court a few weeks back because I’ve become besotted by a most unusual man and I wanted to catch sight of him to see if he actually exists, so bizarre is his story - writes Henry St George.
The man’s name is Farhad Azima and planes are his game. And while aviation might sound quite boring to you and me, a quick Google of Azima’s name reveals an unexpected world of intrigue. Let’s just say the man has a certain ubiquity in the unsavoury corners of our world.
The last days of the Shah of Iran? Azima was there. The U.S.’s Iran-Contra scandal? There too, (allegedly) smuggling arms. Azima has also done the arms business in places like Egypt, Pakistan (hello, Osama!) and Afghanistan (hello again!) over the years. And if you prefer your transgressions more contemporary, the Iranian-American businessman was also named in the whole Panama Papers kerfuffle. He’s a wrong ‘un, our Farhad.
But one of the (many) interesting things about Azima is he also keeps polite company. Very polite company. He bunged Bill Clinton $1,000,000 for his Presidential library. He raised some serious cash for Hillary in 2016. He’s matey with Zalmay Khalizad, the former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. He was hanging around Vienna (the city of spies) when the U.S. and Iran were negotiating their (now-dead) nuclear détente. Azima is also close to many a sheikh, general, and think tank head. He even pals around with journalists (no one is perfect). Indeed, Azima reached peak infamy in 2017 as the central character in the defenestration of an American journalist Jay Solomon. The man seems to be a necessary grease for the complexities of our modern world.
The matter prompting my mid-November lurk outside a U.K. High Court was, sadly, more prosaic, although still spiced with intrigue: Azima stands accused by the tiny Emirate of Ras al Khaimah of defrauding it of some $2.6 million US dollars. A piddling amount, really, and uninteresting in the main, but for the manner in which the fraud was discovered. Azima claims the Emirate discovered his alleged fraud only by hacking his personal information and then spaffing it all over something called the dark web because...well, Azima never really answers that question in his telling of the story.
And if this summary of the November court proceedings is accurate, the judge overseeing the U.K. proceedings appears to share my skepticism about the Emirate’s desire to unleash the cyber dogs of war, striking down numerous passages in Azima’s statement of claim laying the blame for the hack at the feet of poor old Ras al Khaimah. The man on the bench even chalked off two of Azima’s personal references, one of whom, John Holmes, was turned over by the Sunday Times for supporting that bruiser Bashar Assad. It was a bad day for Azima (at a cost of £58,000, to be paid forthwith, bringing his total to £180,000), which is possibly why he didn’t even bother turning up to court (leaving me severely disappointed, in case you were wondering).
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Yet, there I hovered in the cold, hoping this mysterious figure would arrive. But instead of meeting Azima and interrogating him about his life of caviar and skullduggery, I was forced to read dull transcripts of dull barristers droning on about this and that, about precedents for the eligibility of something or other, and about the meanings of previous rulings about admissibility. I was about to fall asleep until the wigged crowd started in on Azima’s reaction to the news that his deepest darkest secrets were now available for all to read in August of 2016.
I would have panicked at the prospect, so indiscreet are my personal communications. Indeed, I apologise to you all in advance, should it ever happen. But Azima? By all accounts, the chap stayed as cool as a cucumber. “Someone has set this up with no good intent,” Azima is said to have mused in response over email after he was alerted to the hack (I like to think with cigarette and scotch in hand, and a gorgeous femme fatale by his side). I certainly can’t imagine James Bond responding with such sang froid.
I mean, someone? How many people does one have to anger - and to what degree - to not know who is out to turn them over in such spectacular fashion? I would like to think if I angered someone to the point where they’re willing to hack into my communications to smear me I would bloody well know. But not our boy Azima. And he certainly didn’t appear to finger the Emirate straightaway. He didn’t bother pointing the finger of blame Ras al Khaimah’s way until they sued him for fraud a few months later. Now pointing the finger their way is all he does.
According to the court newswire, Azima’s QC spent the last day of the hearing trying to keep communications between Azima and his communications advisors in the immediate wake of the hack out of the record, citing privilege. The judge declined, for the obvious reason that communications advisors aren’t lawyers. But why the worry? If this British lawyer chap Azima likes to bang on about was really threatening a bit of argy bargy why wasn’t he the obvious culprit the very second the information was hacked and leaked? Why the furious reverse engineering? I imagine you could have felt the air seep out of the courtroom.
Put differently, is my international man of mystery really just a simple fraud, looking for a post-facto justification for his naughtiness? I really hope it isn’t the case, it would smash my conception of the mysterious Farhad Azima.
Worry not, dear reader. Fahad-beh will be back before the court on his fraud charge in January. And I will be there, this time in the room. Until then, however, I will have to content myself with reading through his personal communications which, for some reason, remain spaffed across cyberspace.
