Reports began to surface on social media on Friday that dozens of Russians and Belarusians had received messages that their Bank of Georgia accounts were being closed.
“As a rule, credit institutions usually apply such algorithms in case of suspicions about the risks of money laundering, etc.,” Nigmatullin believes.
In his opinion, circumventing sanctions restrictions, especially with the use of the cryptocurrency market, could provoke a wave of this type of action, for example, after a planned round of internal audits of a credit institution or at the disposal of the regulator.
The official representative of the BOG confirmed to the Kommersant newspaper the information about the closure of part of the accounts, but emphasized that the changes affected a certain category of clients “regardless of their citizenship”. The bank refused to give an exact reason.
