The business between the billionaire and the Turkish ruling family is based on a complicated structure now revealed to the public for the first time using research and documents from the 'Malta Files' and other sources. Mansimov ordered the building of the Agdash – named after a city in central Azerbaijan - from a state-owned Russian shipyard called United Shipping. In March 2007, he opened a Malta company for the vessel, Pal Shipping Trader One. In the same month, Erdoğan's brother-in-law, Ziya Ilgen, registered Bumerz Limited in the Isle of Man, a small Island in the Irish Sea that recently attempted to throw of its reputation as a tax haven.

Ilgen, a former teacher, rarely appears in public. But he is said to have managed Erdoğan’s business interests after he became prime minister in 2003. United Shipping delivered the Agdash to Mansimov in the autumn of 2007. To help pay the bill for the construction, the Azeri arranged a loan of 18.4 million dollars from the Latvian bank, Parex, which for years was known to launder cash from corrupt figures from Eastern Europe and the ex-USSR.

The loan was never issued to Mansimov. Instead, the Agdash spent a year sailing around the North Sea and Baltic Sea, visiting ports and oil terminals in the likes of Latvia, Netherlands and the UK. Meanwhile then-Prime Minister Erdoğan fended off threats from Turkey’s courts and military. In October 2008, with Erdoğan's situation stabilised in Turkey, Bumerz Limited obtained 100 per cent of shares in the Agdash’s Maltese parent company, Pal Shipping Trader One for around 25 million dollars - the value of the ship when it was first built. The family now owned its first oil tanker.

Documents from the Isle of Man company registry show that the day after the transfer, on 24 October 2008, Parex Bank finally issued the 18.4 million USD loan - to Bumerz. On some of documents for the financing, available on the public registry, Ziya Ilgen's name appears. The Erdoğans, however, never paid a cent of the loan. In a seven-year charter contract agreed that same day, Mansimov pledged to repay the Parex credit completely on behalf of the Erdoğans.

According to Maltese documents, the agreement, between Bumerz and Mansimov’s Palmali Shipping in the Caribbean, states that he would “pay as from the 1st to the 37th instalment to Parex Banka on behalf of Bumerz Limited as a charter hire of Pal Shipping Trader One Co Ltd or directly to Bumerz Limited”. This means that the Agdash is essentially a gift from Mansimov. And from 2008 to October 2015, this gift cost him at least 21.2 million USD. Here is a graphic of the Mansimov deal: