Watchdog

The head of Azerbaijan's Turan news agency says the authorities have frozen all of the outlet's bank accounts amid a criminal tax probe that rights groups call part of a broader crackdown on independent media and critical voices.

Mehman Aliyev told RFE/RL on August 18 that the news agency's accounts were frozen two days earlier, the same day that tax officials raided its office in Baku, confiscating financial documents and checking the personal belongings of its employees.

"All of Turan's accounts were frozen on the day of the raid," Aliyev said. "Technically, it means that whatever money Turan receives for its services will be confiscated."

He added that the move puts the agency at risk of closing down. Turan publishes reports in Azeri, English, and Russian, and cooperates with leading international news agencies.

Officials launched a tax-evasion investigation into Turan on August 7. Investigators allege that the agency owes 37,000 manats ($21,500) in taxes for 2014-16.

The editors of Turan, which was established in 1990, deny the allegation and say the probe is politically motivated.

Western governments and international rights watchdogs have criticized Baku for clamping down on independent media outlets, journalists, and opposition politicians and activists.

President Ilham Aliyev, who has ruled the oil-producing South Caucasus country of nearly 10 million people since shortly before his father's death in 2003, has shrugged off the criticism.

Giorgi Gogia, South Caucasus director with the New York-based Human Rights Watch, called the investigation into Turan "the latest in a vicious crackdown on critical media in the country."

"Using bogus tax-related charges to jail critical journalists is nothing new for Azerbaijan," Gogia wrote on August 17.

The New York-based Committee To Protect Journalists (CPJ) the same day said Baku "has repeatedly used politically motivated criminal charges as a weapon to silence independent and opposition media."

"We call on Azerbaijani authorities to drop the politically motivated investigation into Turan news agency and to stop trying to intimidate independent journalists with legal harassment," Nina Ognianova, CPJ’s program coordinator for Europe and Central Asia, said in a statement.

Last week, the Paris-based media-rights watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF) condemned "the Azerbaijani government's use of tax-evasion allegations to harass" Turan, which it said was "the last independent media outlet still operating within the country."

Azerbaijan is ranked 162nd out of 180 countries in RSF’s 2017 World Press Freedom Index.

Georgia has requested that Ukraine extradite Mikheil Saakashvili, the former Georgian president and ex-governor of Ukraine's Odesa region who was stripped of his Ukrainian citizenship last month.

The Georgian Prosecutor-General's Office said on August 18 that it was cooperating with Ukrainian authorities on Saakashvili's extradition.

The statement came two days after Saakashvili, who is currently in Poland, announced that he planned to return to Ukraine on September 10 by crossing the Polish-Ukrainian border in Ukraine's western region of Lviv.

President Petro Poroshenko stripped Saakashvili of his Ukrainian citizenship on July 26, a move that the former Georgian president condemned as an "illegal way to remove me from the political scene in Ukraine."

Ukrainian authorities have said they will bar Saakashvili from entering the country and will confiscate his passport should he attempt entry.

When Saakashvili was still the Odesa region's governor, Kyiv refused to extradite him to Georgia at least twice.

In a controversial audio recording that went viral online on August 12, a man with a voice similar to that of Georgian Interior Minister Giorgi Mgebrishvili tells another man who introduces himself as Ukrainian Interior Minister Arsen Avakov that Tbilisi does not want Saakashvili back in Georgia as it might lead to disorder.

Russian prankster Aleksei Stolyarov said later that he had tricked Mgebrishvili, introducing himself by phone as his Ukrainian counterpart, and recorded the talk.

Saakashvili was stripped of his Georgian citizenship in 2015 after he took Ukrainian citizenship in order to become Odesa governor, the post he resigned from in November, saying that the government in Kyiv was sabotaging crucial reforms.

Georgia is seeking Saakashvili's extradition to face charges related to the violent dispersal of protesters and a raid on a private television station.

He says those charges are politically motivated.

With reporting by Imedi-TV and Interfax