Cartu Bank assesses the current events as a political revengefulness against Bidzina Ivanishvili.

Cartu Bank assesses current events as political revengefullness against Bidzina Ivanishvili. Interpressnews presents the statement that the Legal Department of the bank disseminated.

“Due to the events developed lately, a demand on the cash from our clients has increased due to the fast flow of money from the bank accounts and especially from the deposits. Also, the fact that the deposits are mainly in foreign currency should be taken into account.

In order to satisfy the demands of the bank clients, two standard bank note agreements were signed with Bank of Georgia and Cartu Bank on October 18th of 2011.

According to the agreements, the Cartu Bank transferred 2 000 000 US dollars from its correspondent account of Deutsche Bank Trust Company Americas (New York, USA) to the account of Bank of Georgia in Citibank International (New York, USA) and 1 000 000 Euros to Commerzbank (Frankfurt, Germany) from its account to the account of Bank of Georgia in the same bank. For these transactions, Cartu Bank was supposed to receive 2 000 000 US dollars and 1 000 000 Euros from the Bank of Georgia as cash.

On October 18th at about 17:15 pm, in the territory of the main building of Bank of Georgia, the law-enforcement officials detained four accountants of Cartu Bank, two cash collectors and their accompaniy a security guard. The policemen were dressed in the civil clothes; some were in masks that violated the Law on Police. Also the procedural norms on the detention and other rights and obligations were violated. The cash collectors could have fired at the policemen since they were not wearing uniforms and could have been thought to be criminals. This could have resulted in bloodshed. The bank officials were transferred to department VII of the old Tbilisi from where they were released after giving the testimony.

The law-enforcement officials seized the VOLKSWAGEN type cash collecting car with state licenses BAT 963 which was transferring the financial assets of the bank 2 000 000 US dollars and 1 000 000 Euros to strengthen the bank cashbox.

According to the official information of MIA, the case is filed under the article 194 of the Criminal Code of Georgia – legalizing big amount of illegal financial assets (money laundering).

Cartu Bank cannot understand what were the grounds for considering widely spread cashbox operation to be money laundering. Especially, considering the fact that throughout this year Cartu Bank made approximately two hundred same kinds of agreements the total amount of which exceeded the equivalent of several ten million US dollars.

We assess the occurred as one more fact of political revengefulness against Bidzina Ivanishvili.”