Today’s Fairfax papers carry an apology to Javad Marandi, a major Tory donor in the UK the papers had accused of being involved in Unaoil’s Azerbaijan operation, based on emails that showed payments being made to someone called “Javad”. An article making these allegations has since been removed.

In today’s apology, Fairfax states that it “accepts Mr Marandi had no knowledge of Unaoil’s corruption and was not involved in the making of any corrupt payments on Unaoil’s behalf”.

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Fairfax’s Unaoil investigation implicated Western companies and many of the world’s most powerful people for involvement in bribing third-world officials for access to resources. It has come under criticism from The Australian, which revealed Fairfax’s investigation came at the same time someone called “Komrade” tried to extort the Ahsani family, which owns Unaoil, for US$5 million worth of bitcoins.