The Sinister Side of Tarlan Ahmadov’s Shusha Junket

Just what were they thinking?

When three Maine legislators agreed to go on junket to Azerbaijan last year with former Maine Department of Labor official and current director of Governor Janet Mills’ Office of New Americans Tarlan Ahmadov, did it occur to Rep. Deqa Dhalac (D-South Portland), Rep. Mana Abdi (D-Lewiston) and Sen Jill Duson (D-Cumberland) that something about the trip was just plain fishy?

“Our visit to Shusha was unforgettable for me,” Rep. Dhalac told state-controlled Azeri media last spring, adding: “I especially want to talk about the restoration and reconstruction works carried out by the Azerbaijani government in Shusha, Lachin, and other liberated territories over the past 4 years. Of course, the government is doing its best for the return of internally displaced persons to their homes as soon as possible.” 

Shusha is located in the long-disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, which Azerbaijan occupied in 2020, while the rest of the world was locked down for the COVID-19 pandemic. The ethnic Armenians who lived there prior to the military operation have since become refugees.

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Cursory research would have shown that an all-expense paid trip to Azerbaijan and its conquered territories was at best suspect and more likely just a bad idea for any public servant mindful of propriety and balance. Social media was just one area where the Azeri regime had been literally buying off influencers to legitimize its military seizure of Shusha and forcible displacement of over 100,000 of its long-time residents.

Instead of reading about Shusha in Foeder’s or the The Lonely Planet, a prospective visitor needs to visit the site Dark Tourism to get the tourist’s low-down on the place. That in itself might have been a clue.

In the years prior to Ahmadov’s leading a delegation of Maine state lawmakers to tour Azerbaijan’s war-time gains in the long-disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, the country whose president awarded him a special honor lavished $7 million on lobbying in Washington, D.C. in what experts have called a fling of “caviar diplomacy.”

Yet this sum may only scratch the surface. In a 2023 report, the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft stated:

“All of this is just what’s publicly known about Azerbaijan’s influence in America which, given Azerbaijan’s history, is likely just the tip of the iceberg. As the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) has painstakingly documented, the Azerbaijan government has a history of laundering its influence in Europe and the United States.”

[RELATED: Did Janet Mills Hire an Unregistered Foreign Agent to Run Maine’s New Migrant Office?]

The OCCRP report details how an “Azerbaijan Laundromat” operated out of shell companies in the United Kingdom, laundering at least $3 billion. How precisely this ties to the source of funds behind the Fund for the Azeri Diaspora is murky at best, but the availability of such research might have given a conscientious individual pause before signing up on such a trip.

(Photo credit: AzerNews May 4, 2024)

To give Sen. Duson the benefit of the doubt, the new phenomenon of “green-washing” was not fully understood before the capital of Azerbaijan, Baku, became the host of the COP 29, or United Nations conference on cutting carbon emissions (the previous year, 2023, COP 28 was hosted by oil-rich Dubai). Yet the tendency of kleptocratic, anti-democratic regimes to hold conferences on the climate and “green energy revolutions” is now beginning to show itself for what it is.

According to state-controlled Azeri media, Duson expressed interest in potential cooperation in the design and construction of a solar power station in Azerbaijan.

But there’s nothing new about Azerbaijan’s “shadow influence” tactics in Washington. According to a report ten years ago by an independent Azeri news agency, Azerbaijan was already one of the ten top spenders on lobbyists among foreign countries attempting to wield influence with American officials — and this only accounted for officially-declared spending.

Political travel to Azerbaijan has been a fraught exercise ever since Barack Obama strategist David Plouffe embarrassed the Obama administration in 2009 by getting caught taking a $50,000 honorarium for giving a speech in Baku and ended up donating his fee to the National Democratic Institute.

In 2018, a Turkish-American businessman was indicted on four counts of lying to the House Ethics Committee about the sources of funding for trips he had organized via the so-called Turquoise Council of Eurasian and Americans that brought members of Congress and their staff to Azerbaijan. According to documents filed with the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, the actual source of funds was the State Oil Company of Azerbaijan (SOCAR), which is owned by the Azeri government.

The same source of funds is cited in the more recent indictment of U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas), who has been charged by federal prosecutors last year for taking $600,000 in bribes from Azeri official and acting as a foreign agent on Azerbaijan’s behalf.

Cuellar’s indictment coincided with the Ahmadov-led Maine delegation’s visit to Azerbaijan and Azeri-seized territories.

Four months after the Maine junket, a multinational association of NGOs allied to prevent torture appealed to the European Commission to take action against Azerbaijan’s “unprecedented” repressions and stated in their letter that “almost no independent civil society actor remains free in the country.”