NEWSTexas-Based Private Equity Firm Cozies Up To Azerbaijan’s Authoritarian President Touting Investment Opportunities
Sept. 23 2024, Published 1:21 a.m. ET
The founder and CEO of a Texas-based private equity firm traveled to Azerbaijan last week to meet with President Ilham Aliyev about strengthening ties with the State Oil Fund of Azerbaijan despite the country's record of human rights abuses.
Robert F. Smith, founder and CEO of Vista Equity Partners, met with Aliyev on Sept. 13 with high praise for Azerbaijan's investment potential, and seeking to expand cooperation in the country. Vista Equity Partners, which manages some $100 billion in private equity and private credit funds, has had a longstanding partnership with the State Oil Fund of Azerbaijan.
The country has launched repeated offensives in Nagorno-Karabakh, also known as Artsakh, a mostly ethnic Armenian region of the country, and launched an invasion in September 2020. Although that brief war ended in a ceasefire agreement in November that year, Azerbaijan in 2022 imposed a months-long blockade that caused "acute shortages of food, medication, hygiene products, and other essential supplies to the area," according to Human Rights Watch.
On Sept. 19, 2023, Azerbaijan launched another military offensive to retake the breakaway region. Within a matter of days in September and October, more than 100,000 ethnic Armenians were forced to flee to Armenia, according to Amnesty International.
When the band Imagine Dragons performed in Baku, Azerbaijan, in September 2023, System of a Down frontman Serj Tankian, who is Armenian-American, criticized the decision as an endorsement of the country's authoritarian government. But earlier this year, Imagine Dragons frontman Dan Reynolds defended the concerts in an interview with Rolling Stone.
“I think that’s a really slippery slope,” he told the outlet. “I think the second you start to do that, there’s corrupt leaders and warmongers all over the world, and where do you draw the line?”
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But Tankian doubled down on social media in July, asking if the band would play in Nazi Germany.
“Respectfully, I draw the line at ethnic cleansing and genocide,” Tankian wrote.
“Azerbaijan’s dictatorship with popular support was already into a nine-month starvation blockade of Nagorno-Karabagh qualified as genocide by former [International Criminal Court] prosecutor [Luis Moreno Ocampo] when they decided to play Baku. Would they play in Nazi Germany? Why don’t they want to play in Russia? Because it’s not popular?" he continued.
