(Bloomberg) -- An Azeri politician suspected of having money-laundering ties was able to buy luxury London residences for 26.5 million pounds ($34.5 million) while his family members’ U.K. bank accounts were being probed and their funds frozen.

Javanshir Feyziyev, a serving member of Azerbaijan’s parliament, bought two apartments in the exclusive Chelsea Barracks complex under his name in 2019 and 2020, U.K. Land Registry filings show. At the time, accounts belonging to Feyziyev’s wife, son and nephew were frozen as part of a civil investigation into the original source of their cash, some of which Feyziyev had transferred to them, court records show.

In January a judge concluded that some of the monies were probably derived from the Azerbaijan Laundromat and allowed investigators to seize 5.6 million pounds of the frozen funds, releasing remaining balances, the National Crime Agency said in a public statement at the time. The international money-laundering scheme funneled dirty money out of the country through the U.K., enabling the flow of about $3 billion.

Before it was paid to Feyziyev, cash “flowed through various intermediaries of which the family had neither knowledge, nor control of,” a spokesperson for the Feyziyev family told Bloomberg. “There were no findings that the family were aware of any money laundering which was alleged to take place,” the spokesperson said, declining to comment on whether Feyziyev’s family is appealing the ruling.

The purchases, which have not been reported before, raise further questions about Britain’s ability to clamp down on potential flows of dirty money. Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government, in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, has rushed legislation to create a register of foreign owners of property and expand powers to investigate sources of wealth amid concern oligarchs have plowed illicit funds into the nation.

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“Feyziyev is central to this case because the funds that are sought to be forfeited largely came from bank accounts under his control,” the NCA’s lawyer said in court documents that were prepared for the seizure hearing.

A spokesman for the NCA declined to comment on why Feyziyev’s personal accounts were not included in the requests to freeze and seize assets.

Feyziyev has established connections with Britain and Europe through his position in parliament. He chairs the U.K.-Azerbaijan All Parliamentary Co-operation Committee, and is co-chair of the EU-Azerbaijan Parliamentary Co-operation Committee, the spokesperson said. The EU committee last met in December to discuss issues including economic cooperation and the rule of law in Azerbaijan.

Investigators for the NCA said that money in the accounts of Feyziyev’s relatives had been moved through a complex network of shell companies that operated bank facilities in Estonia and Latvia. Some of these transfers were accompanied by documents purporting to show legitimate business transactions, the court ruling shows.

But the judge found “overwhelming evidence” that these documents were entirely fictitious and masked money laundering, the NCA said in its statement.

Feyziyev told a U.K. asset management company handling relatives’ funds in 2013 that his wealth stood at as much as 50 million pounds, according to the court documents. That excluded a 5 million-pound home he owned then and an interest in Avromed Company LLC, an Azeri company that imported pharmaceuticals from the U.S. and Europe, the filing shows.

By 2019 Feyziyev claimed that he was seeking financial assistance from others to pay bills and expenses because he had lost access to U.K. banks, according to his witness statement in a separate libel case against the co-founder of the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project.

The spokesperson for the Feyziyev family told Bloomberg that the accounts were closed after the OCCRP reported on Feyziyev’s alleged ties to the laundromat. Feyziyev denied involvement in money laundering when announcing a settlement with OCCRP in January 2020 in the libel case.

Feyziyev reserved the Chelsea Barracks properties when they were still under construction, years before completing the purchases, the spokesperson said. He paid for the apartments in 2019 and 2020 with loans from a private lender in the U.K. and a foreign bank because the family was struggling to get access to cash at the time, the spokesperson said, declining to identify the lenders. The two residences cost 18.4 million pounds and 8.1 million pounds, the filings show.

The Chelsea Barracks development, nestled between London’s Belgravia and Chelsea, features a 19th-century chapel and a 13,000 square-foot private spa. A spokesperson for Qatari Diar Real Estate Investment Co., which co-developed the property and was the sole owner at the time of the sales, declined to comment when contacted by Bloomberg.

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Transparency International U.K., the British arm of the global anti-corruption group, last month said it had found that 6.7 billion pounds of properties in the U.K. have been bought with suspicious wealth. But that’s probably only “just the tip of the iceberg” of the real value of dirty money hidden in U.K. real estate, according to TI, because of the current secrecy around ownership. TI didn’t identify the buyers.

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