The Council of Europe in cooperation with the Office of the Prosecutor General of Georgia (OGP) organised a specialised training course on “Investigation and prosecution of corruption offences”.
The event brought together 25 experienced investigators and prosecutors from all the regions of the country and Tbilisi Prosecutor’s Office. With the contribution of local trainers (prosecutors from Tbilisi Prosecutor’s Office and the Office of the General Prosecutor) and international expertise from the Council of Europe, participants discussed each stage of the investigation and prosecution of economic crimes, focusing on corruption and money laundering offences, the role of different institutions in the process, the importance of inter-agency and international cooperation and coordination, criminal liability of legal entities and the practice in imposing sanctions. The interactive nature of the training enabled participants to learn new trends as well as to share their own experience on recent methods and tactics of investigation of economic crimes, and to enhance the professional network throughout the country.
For the first two days, participants benefited from the opportunity to discuss with their counterparts at the domestic level the challenges they face in their professional activities, and to share their own views on how to solve the problems raised. They applied their discussions in practice to scenarios from the Georgian reality at the end of each thematic session. On the third day of the event, after having gotten acquainted with the issues discussed and challenges identified at the local level in the first two days, an international expert shared good practices of anti-corruption and anti-money laundering investigation and prosecution from an international perspective, thus allowing for an open exchange of knowledge and approaches between the Georgian practice and that of other countries.
This training course supported these experienced practitioners from the Prosecutor’s Office to further develop their skills to investigate and prosecute economic crime, to efficiently implement the legal framework on criminal legal liability as well as to establish a more robust practice of recovery of proceeds from crime.
This event is a part of series of activities designed to support the national authorities to improve frameworks and operational capacities for the investigation, prosecution and adjudication of corruption, money laundering/financing of terrorism (ML/FT) and other economic crime cases.
The activity was organised in the framework of the project “Enhancing the systems of prevention and combating corruption, money laundering and terrorist financing in Georgia”, funded by the European Union and the Council of Europe and implemented by the Council of Europe in their Partnership for Good Governance II.
