Georgia: The Georgian Prosecutor’s Office arrested ten people after conducting complex investigations with the Ministry of Internal Affairs employees.
According to the investigation conducted by the Georgian Prosecutor’s Office, it has been established that in 2022, a citizen of the Islamic State of Iran formed an organized criminal group to deal with drugs and to legalize illegal and undocumented income.
The organized group consisting of the accused intended to launder, in order to gain material benefits, especially large quantities of illegal and undocumented properties of origin. Functions were distributed among the members of the organized group, which were used to disguise the property gained from criminal activities and to legalize the economic turnover of the drug revenues.
Regarding the head of the organized group, with the revenues received from the realization of drugs in Tbilisi, on behalf of other people, he was conducting restaurant and nightclub business at three different addresses.
The goal of the club business was the realization of a drug and the cover and whitening of illegal origin obtained from it. Members of the organized group artificially increased the revenue received by the mentioned clubs; in particular, in October 2023, the defendants seemed to have received an income of 3,000,000 GEL in just five days. Thus, the origin of the money received as a result of drug realization was masked.
Part of the money was transferred to the bank account of one of the criminal group members at different times. The latter, yes, carried out money transfers abroad and cryptocurrency exchange operations.
Also, other members of the organized group systematically purchased various types of cryptocurrencies with the money received as a result of the drug’s realization, and the head of the organized group paid off the money received after the realization.
