Translated material
Whistleblower Arrest
The police came for Okruashvili to his office
A former ally of the Georgian president, Irakli Okruashvili, who became the leader of the Georgian opposition, was arrested last night at the office of his movement “For a United Georgia” after his revelations . The police arrived just when Okruashvili (who is also the former Prosecutor General, Minister of Internal Affairs, Defense and Economic Development) was supposed to travel to Eastern Georgia on party business. He walked out to the police car calmly, with a cigarette in his hands.This happened two days after 33-year-old Okruashvili told reporters that in the summer of 2005, President Mikheil Saakashvili allegedly offered him to eliminate the oligarch Badri Patarkatsishvili. He remembered how three years ago he convicted the president’s uncle, UN official Temuri Alasania, of bribery (the amount of the bribe was $200 thousand) and arrested him in Tbilisi. But Saakashvili intervened in the matter and freed his relative. Okruashvili also made it clear that Prime Minister Zurab Zhvania did not die in the winter of 2005 in the apartment in which his body was found. And he said that in the summer of 2005 a war with South Ossetia almost broke out. The politician repeated all this at the meeting with the US Ambassador to Georgia John Tefft the day before yesterday. Just at this time, President Saakashvili was in New York at the UN General Assembly .
Okruashvili did not stop there. Yesterday he reported plans to split the Georgian church and the illegal business interests of relatives of Interior Minister Ivane Merabishvili.
A deputy from the opposition Republican Party, Levan Berdzenishvili, told Vremya Novostey that these revelations “are making the authorities hysterical.” Deputy Kakha Kukava from the opposition conservatives announced that “Okruashvili’s fault is that he opposed the monarch” (that is, the president). Today the opposition will call on Georgians to go to rallies.
Irakli Okruashvili, according to a representative of the Prosecutor General’s Office, is accused of corruption when he was Minister of Defense (we are talking about multimillion-dollar transactions, for example in connection with the construction of barracks). His acquisition of a building for a party office is also being linked to the case. Officially, 250 thousand dollars were paid for it, but there is information that the amount was 1.8 million, and Okruashvili hid taxes from the state.