More than $1 million in illicit proceeds from the scams allegedly flowed into bank accounts held by Davit Kezerashvili, and two family members, according to the Prosecutor’s Office of Georgia.
Kezerashvili served as head of the financial police and then defense minister under Mikheil Saakashvili, who was president of the small country in the Caucasus region from 2004 to 2013. Kezerashvili has not been charged.
The investigation, involving law enforcement in Georgia and Germany, netted four suspects who are facing charges of “fraud and money laundering by an organized group.” One of the suspects allegedly sent Kezerashvili and his relatives the cash, according to the prosecutor’s office.
“The investigation in this matter continues actively, including with the involvement of our foreign colleagues,” prosecutors said.
Kezerashvili insists the probe is part of a smear campaign against him.
“The Georgian government, using state bodies and institutions, continues a defamatory campaign against me. On September 6, the allegations by the Prosecutor’s Office of Georgia are another attempt to politically motivated persecution and my discrediting,” he claims in a Facebook post.
In the Georgian capital of Tbilisi on Thursday, police swept in on “a large fraudulent call center,” seizing hundreds of computers and phones, along with vehicles and more than $800,000 in cash. The group operated under the company name Morgan Limited LLC, prosecutors said.
In 2020, OCCRP reported on a network of call centers spanning Georgia, Albania and Ukraine, which employed an army of salespeople to hawk dubious investments to victims around the world. Although the centers used different names with their customers, they were known as Milton Group in Ukraine and Morgan Limited in Georgia.
They defrauded vulnerable and elderly victims across the world, who were induced to send the scammers large sums of money under the belief they were making investments. A Spanish police investigation estimated in 2022 that the operation had stolen billions of euros in total from thousands of victims.
Georgian prosecutors said the criminal group busted on Thursday in that country had defrauded citizens of Germany, Slovenia and Slovakia of about $2.9 million.
The call center employees would register victims on cryptocurrency exchange platforms, and then transfer their purchased “virtual assets” to digital wallets controlled by the crime group. At the same time, they would show the victims fake platforms that simulated increases on their investments.
“They terminated all communication with the victims if the latter requested the invested funds or the profits to be returned to them,” prosecutors said.
Kezerashvili was charged in 2013 with accepting $12 million in bribes to turn a blind eye to massive smuggling of alcohol from Ukraine to Georgia. He was ultimately cleared of the charges, which he also says were politically motivated.
This story has been updated with the reaction from Davit Kezerashvili.