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Eurasia
August 25, 2017 www.intellinews.com I Page 17
Azerbaijan uses same old trick to silence last independent news agency
bne IntelliNews
Organisations supporting freedom of speech such as Reporters Without Borders (RWB), the Com- mittee to Protect Journalists and Human Rights Watch (HRW) have all condemned Baku’s latest crackdown on the last independent news agency in the country, Turan, as well as the subsequent detaining of the agency’s chief on August 24.
The agency has been accused by the Azerbaijani authorities of evading some AZN37,000 (€19,500) in taxes since 2014. Upon learning of the investi- gation that the tax ministry had launched, Turan said it would cooperate with the authorities and provide the documents it had demanded. However, officials from the tax ministry conducted a search at Turan's offices on August 16, confiscating lap- tops and documents. A day later, the agency an- nounced that its bank accounts had been frozen, meaning its survival was on the line.
Before his detention, Turan’s director general, Mehman Aliyev, told the Yeni Musavat newspaper that he was concerned about the case. “We are accused of tax evasion. The searches have started automatically. It is not difficult to foresee the re- sults. Turan could be closed down,” he said.
Accusing government critics of financial misde- meanours such as tax evasion on relatively mod- est sums of money is a common tactic that Baku has used to rid itself of dissenting voices in recent
years. Meanwhile, revelations such as those con- tained in the “Panama Papers” document cache and by investigations into the country’s notori- ously corrupt customs office, which purport to show that billions of manats of public money were siphoned off, have not been followed up with any official investigations. Thus cracking down on tax evasion in Azerbaijan seems to be more a tool
to silence inconvenient voices, rather than as an earnest attempt to rid the economy of such prac- tices.
In its statement, HRW condemned the adminis- tration of President Ilham Aliyev (no relation to Mehman Aliyev) of having gifted more than 200 apartments to journalists in July while claiming that his administration was a “friend of journal- ists”, is in fact an attempt to buy their sympathy. Meanwhile, independent journalists such as Faig Amirli, Khadija Ismayilova, Aziz Orujov and oth- ers have all received hefty prison sentences for tax evasion and related charges. Turan is a victim of similar “bogus charges”, HRW’s Giorgi Gogia wrote on August 18.
RWB also condemned Baku in a statement issued for using accusations of tax evasion to harass Turan, while the CPJ called on the Azerbaijani au- thorities to “drop the politically motivated inves- tigation” and to “strop trying to intimidate inde- pendent journalists with legal harassment”.