In 2007, the Azerbaijani government awarded the right to operate a gold mines in the village of Chovdar to a (supposedly) British company called AIMROC. But the Panama Papers revealed that president Ilham Aliyev and his daughters may control over half of AIMROC’s mining operations, hidden through a network of off-shore shell companies. The mine stopped its operations just a few years later and stopped paying its employees. While the reasons are unknown and ownership structures remain opaque, it is clear that Azerbaijani citizens paid the price for this shady deal – many of them lost their land and they have been cheated out of the income from their country’s natural resources.