Tory MP 'Fed' Azerbaijan Propaganda For Parliamentary Debates

A senior Tory Member of Parliament (MP) has boasted that he was “fed” propaganda by the Azerbaijani embassy and used it to lobby the UK government, James Dowsett and Thomas Rowley reported for openDemocracy .

Photo Insert: MP for Harrow East and chair of the Azerbaijan All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) Bob Blackman

The admission came in a podcast where Bob Blackman, the MP for Harrow East and chair of the Azerbaijan All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG), also said: “On a regular basis I put down positions on behalf of our good friends in Azerbaijan.”

Blackman – an executive secretary of the Conservatives’ influential backbench 1922 Committee – has taken seven free trips, worth tens of thousands of pounds, to oil-rich Azerbaijan since 2011. The three most recent trips were paid for by either the Azerbaijani parliament or its London embassy.

In 2020, he urged the then foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, to take Azerbaijan’s side in its bloody territorial dispute with Armenia over the region of Nagorno-Karabakh, in which thousands of people are believed to have died. Both sides have been accused of carrying out war crimes.

Blackman has received a series of briefings from high-level Azerbaijani figures, including Azerbaijani MP Javanshir Feyziyev – who was at the center of a high-profile court case that saw £5.6-million of laundered cash ordered to be seized from his family’s bank accounts this week.

Blackman has tabled four pro-regime motions in the Commons since July 2020 and written to Raab’s successor, Liz Truss, urging her to strengthen ties with Azerbaijan. Apart from one instance, the MP did not mention that he had accepted hospitality connected to the state within the preceding year.

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