Azerbaijani company wanted to bribe congressmen for exclusion from sanctions regime

In 2013, the State Oil Company of Azerbaijan secretly financed all expenses related to a trip to Baku for a conference of ten members of Congress and 32 employees of its staff.

This was reported by the Washington Post, referring to the confidential report of the Congressional Ethics Office, which was at its disposal.

The newspaper also reported that three former high-ranking Obama aides spoke at the conference: Robert Gibbs, Jim Messina and David Square.

Lawmakers and their employees received hundreds of thousands of dollars in the form of payment for travel and gifts: silk scarves, crystal tea sets and Azerbaijani carpets worth from 2500 to 10000 dollars, the report says with reference to the report.

According to the documents, only expenses for airline tickets for legislators, and in some cases their spouses, were about 113 thousand dollars.

The authors of the 70-page report suggest that the State Oil Company of the Azerbaijan Republic (SOCAR) transferred 750 thousand dollars to non-profit organizations in the United States to hide the source of funding for the conference in the former Soviet republic.

These NGOs allegedly submitted false documents to Congress that they sponsored the conference, the Washington Post reports.

The results of the investigation were referred to a committee of the House of Representatives on Ethics to investigate possible violations of Congress regulations and federal laws prohibiting foreign governments from influencing American politics.

SOCAR issued a statement in which it indicated that it did not make secrets from the fact that it supported the holding of the conference, and accused NGOs of not submitting the relevant information disclosure documents, writes the Washington Post.

The US-Azerbaijan “Look into the Future” congress was held on 28-29 in May on 2013, the newspaper writes. During the previous year, SOCAR and several large energy companies sought for themselves exemptions from American economic sanctions against Iran regarding the construction of a gas pipeline in the Caspian Sea worth 28 billions of dollars.

The Department of Ethics is an independent investigative body of the House of Representatives.

According to the newspaper, members of the House of Representatives Jim Bridenstein, Yvette Clarke, Danny Davis, Ruben Hinojosa, Sheila Jackson Lee, Leonard Lance, Michel Luhan Grisham, Gregory Mix and Ted Po, and now former Congresswoman Steve Stockman participated in the trip.