New crypto currency Futira is designed to fi ght money laundering and increase global access to Internet

Hebashi Holding and A New Alliance to Launch a New Currency that Fights Money Laundering

Hebashi Holding Group and Innovation Company has launched the Futira crypto currency, one that will radically change the balance of digital currencies and an invention of Egyptian scientist Dr. Hatem Zaghloul.

A person well-known in High Technology, Dr. Hatim Zaghloul, the CEO and founder of Futira Ltd LLC, Futira S.r.o. and Innovation, is recognized as a visionary leader in the international hi-tech community. In 1992 and 1995, he invented, together with Dr. Michel Fattouche WOFDM and MCDSSS, the basis for many wireless communications standards, including the WiMAX and LTE standards, the IEEE802.11a, g, n, ac standards, and the speed in 3G. Dr. Zaghloul has co-founded many companies, including Wi-LAN Inc., Cell-Loc Inc. Wi-LAN and Cell-Loc were the top two performers on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSE) in 2000.

Futira Ltd LLC of Georgia and Futira s.r.o. were incorporated in November 2021 to issue a token and a coin. The smart contract for the token was deployed on the Tron chain on January 1, 2022.

“We chose the Tron platform because of its speed and low cost compared to a platform such as Ethereum, for example, which thus lowers the cost of transferring for investors in Futira,” Dr. Zaghloul noted. “We plan to issue the Futira Coin within the fi rst six months of 2022.”

The Futira Coin will be on the Futira Chain, a private and permissioned blockchain that will not be anonymous. On February 25, it will launch its digital currency “Futira”.

What distinguishes the Futira coin is that it serves a vital and humanitarian project managed by well-known businessmen and investors, the proceeds from which will be invested in building fourth generation communication networks with the aim of providing Internet service in poor countries in Africa, where more than 900 million people do not have the opportunity to connect to the Internet because of the high cost of the necessary infrastructure.

“We aim to support this infrastructure through the Futira coin, which will allow it to be built through our previous technologies at a cost not exceeding 1/10 of the cost of traditional networks,” Dr. Zaghloul added.

This will be achieved as follows: 1) Using higher 4G towers to reach close to the maximum range of the 4G standard (around 30km). 2) Using mesh Wi-Fi to cover the gaps resulting from the high towers as well as for the denser population areas. 3) Using blockchain to control the authentication and authorization of users. Inovatian Inc, which was also founded by Dr. Zaghloul, will manage the network with funding from the Futira coin.

Once the network is built, it will be the only means of having credit on the network. This ensures continuous demand for the coin. The average user will be buying credit on the network at a rate he understands in his local Fiat currency, but the credit will be converted to Futira Coin in the system. Futira coin will be a means of trading on the telecommunications network, as users in the targeted countries will be able to purchase Futira coin through distributors there and put it in the company's digital wallet for use in obtaining various communication services. The user will not be able to get his money back, but he will be able to transfer Futira coin to other users. It will become a nation known for its mechanical advance in mobile innovations within the future.

Nowadays, Georgia is known as an innovative advanced nation, as well as for the ease of doing commerce with moo tax collection expenses compared with other nations. These companies contribute in innovations and high tech and have already begun their business operations in the country.

Today, Georgia is within the consideration outline once again: Wi-Fi speed communication innovator Dr. Hatim Zaghloul came to Georgia in order to form an IT venture – which will become a long term example of portable administrators worldwide.

Warsaw Convention Report: States Should Effectively Apply Corporate Liability to Money Laundering Offences

The Conference of the Parties of the Council of Europe’s Warsaw Convention has called on its states parties to apply corporate liability to money laundering offences effectively.

In a report released on January 20, the Conference of the Parties of Convention on Laundering, Search, Seizure and Confi scation of the Proceeds from Crime and on the Financing of Terrorism, also known as the “Warsaw Convention“, evaluates the extent to which 36 states have legislative or other measures in place to ensure that legal persons can be held liable for money laundering offences when they are committed on their behalf and for their benefi t.

The liability of legal persons can be particularly valuable for the effective fi ght against money laundering since criminals often use corporations, charities and businesses to launder their illicit gains. Through sophisticated money laundering schemes, they are frequently able to avoid any liability by disguising their involvement in crime and relying on the weakness of the systems of sanctioning legal persons and confi scating their illicit gains.

The report specifi cally assesses how states parties to the treaty implement the provisions of Article 10 of the treaty, which requires them to establish corporate legal liability in their domestic legislation, including when a natural person is involved as an accessory or instigator.

The report concludes that seventeen countries have fully transposed all the provisions of Article 10: Azerbaijan, Cyprus, Croatia, Georgia, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Republic of Moldova, Romania, Portugal, San Marino, Serbia, Slovak Republic and Sweden. 35 of 36 states parties have introduced liability of legal person of money laundering offences in their legislation, as required by paragraph 1 of Article 10, mostly through general provisions of their criminal codes. However, the transposition into domestic legislation differs considerably among states. Eight out of the 36 state parties have not yet established the liability of legal persons for an offence committed by a natural person acting as an accessory or instigator.

Twenty-two countries have complied with the provisions of Article 10 (2), which requires states parties to transpose the liability of the legal person for a money laundering offence committed due to the lack of supervision or control by a natural person who holds a leading position, such as a manager. Seven states have transposed this requirement partially, and eight states have not implemented it yet or have to a very limited extent.

The Conference of the Parties issues several general recommendations to the states parties aimed at enhancing their compliance with Article 10 of the treaty as well as country-specifi c recommendations. It encourages them to ensure that there are corporate liability mechanisms in place that judicial and law enforcement authorities can use in money laundering cases. ***

The Council of Europe´s Convention on Laundering, Search, Seizure and Confi scation of the Proceeds from Crime and on the Financing of Terrorism (CETS no. 198), opened for signature in Warsaw in 2005, is the fi rst international treaty covering both the prevention and the control of money laundering and the fi nancing of terrorism.

It is the only international treaty that gives national authorities the power to halt suspicious transactions at the earliest stage to prevent their movement through the fi nancial system. In addition, specialised fi nancial intelligence units of member states must stop such transactions whenever requested by a fi nancial intelligence unit of another state party.

The Conference of the Parties monitors States Parties’ compliance with the convention.

Image Source: coe.int

Garage Fire: Etseri, Svaneti

BLOG BY TONY HANMER

Ididn’t have the heart for a witty or word-playing title for my article this time. Helluva way to start the New Year, but here we are.

We sometimes get drunk village men knocking at the door at midnight or so looking to buy cigarettes from the shop (at least we don’t sell alcohol). When we ignore them, they phone, so, as soon as the knocking starts, we switch our phones down or off. The nights of January 14 and 15 were in this vein, except that the latter added a phone call from one of the village ladies, which is unusual at this hour, so my wife answered it. “Car, fi re!” was all she understood. The knocking continued, more urgently, with some shouting and whistling, not the typical style. So I put on a dressing gown and some boots and went outside.

More yells, now from further away, and I could see smoke and a glow from inside the garage. It must be a fi re… I felt the steel personal door: if a door is hot, you don’t open it, because the fi re on the other side is big and you’ll instantly add oxygen to feed it. The door was only warm, so I risked opening it, using the key for the padlock, which I always lock at night. Billowing smoke inside, but I couldn’t see where the fi re was. Knowing that most fi re deaths are from smoke inhalation, I realized I couldn’t risk going all the way to the big car doors, which only open from inside, and trying to get the 4x4 out: anything in there could explode at any time, plus all the smoke from plastics and so on was waiting for me. I shut the door again, told my seven young Christian village-volunteer guests to get their passports and get out in case the house caught, summoned a neighbor in person, and then went back into the house to gather a few valuables myself before fl eeing.

My wife had already called 112 for the fi re; the guests, she and I left for the neighbors. I deposited my two small backpacks- laptop, hard drives, wallet, passports, keys -with them and returned to the scene.

By now, a few more neighbors had gathered, some with shovels to try to attack it with snow. Although the two windows were gone by now, we had to keep the two sets of doors shut to contain the fi re; these doors eventually began glowing orange from the intense heat. The police came fi rst, followed (an hour and a half after we called 112) by the fi re engine from Mestia. This was able to draw water from the stream near the house, and then pump it into its hoses; it doesn’t keep its own tank full in winter, having no warm place to park and stop that water from freezing. God help anyone who has a house fi re far from a water source in the 5-6 cold months…

Almost all the village men gathered were drunk, and one had to be restrained from wanting to rush into the garage to try to get the car out; others responded with jeers when we told them to move farther away due to explosion risks, so we left them to it. Eventually, the roof of wood beams and corrugated galvanized steel sheets came down. The cement block walls held. The fi remen continued. There were various containers of gasoline, diesel and paint, plenty of plastics, two gas bottles, and a generator and my car both with gasoline tanks, so, plenty for the confl agration to feed on. We stood in shock, watching it play out.

The police took a statement from me about possible causes, and whether I knew anyone with a grudge against me. No-one and nothing specifi c, I said. They and the fi remen eventually left, but the latter came back twice to check on things, and my wife rebuked them as both times the fi re had re-started in one area and I was trying to put it out with buckets of water. “We were freezing…” they said. As if there wasn’t a warm house waiting right here! She was right.

The guests returned, we were allowed to turn the house electricity back on, and we all turned in to attempt a few hours of sleep.

Next morning’s light showed the full extent of the blaze, still steaming and smoking a bit. The 4x4 sat, burnt right out, on its wheel disks. The inside walls were black… except the one where electricity entered, so, it seems unlikely that this was the cause, common though it generally is with these things. In the afternoon, the inspectors came up from Zugdidi to poke, prod, take photos and ask lots of questions. No, I had left not a thing running from garage electricity, except for a single radiator outside, against the wall of the house where my incoming water freezes unreachably. This radiator was on minimum power and was ruled out as a cause. Mice (who have occasionally chewed paper in the car’s glove compartment) working on electrical wires in the car? Arson? All possibilities had to be considered.

Yesterday, we were requested at Becho police station, the nearest one, some 12 km away; one kind neighbor who had already offered any help drove us there. They took our statements into the computer. But before the printer could work and we could sign the document… the power went out. The police station’s generator uses 5 GEL of fuel an hour, and they didn’t have any fuel in it at that time anyway, so we mused in the twilight about wonderful Svaneti infrastructure and its backward steps. We left, suggesting that for the signing and any further questions, the police come to us.

My team of volunteers were hugely helpful in cleaning up, bless them. This involved taking everything movable out of the garage and sorting it. Roof sheets, remaining half-burnt wood beams, salvageable tools and miscellanea, scrap metal, and garbage. All but the garbage went into the barn, and we took the garbage to the nearby dumpsters in sacks. We all got fi lthy, but neighbors had helped me reconnect the water (which used to enter the house through the garage) before it could freeze, so we had that, and electricity to heat it for showers. The whole experience bonded us like nothing else could.

The last urgent thing was to cover the top layer of cement blocks with weighted down plastic, to stop snow from settling on them, melting and refreezing eventually, and causing damage. That done, we are resting from our labors, punctuated by the occasional stab of remembering something else we lost in the fi re. So many power tools, the workbench, and on and on. Tiny things which had survived gave some gladness: a roofi ng hammer, the wire baobab Christmas tree which my stepsister gave us as we were leaving her family from a Zimbabwe holiday with them some years ago. We are also so grateful that we and the house all came through it physically unscathed: this could have been SO much worse. The losses we will take care of one thing at a time. God knows.

Tony Hanmer has lived in Georgia since 1999, in Svaneti since 2007, and been a weekly writer and photographer for GT since early 2011. He runs the “Svaneti Renaissance” Facebook group, now with nearly 2000 members, at www.facebook.com/ groups/SvanetiRenaissance/ He and his wife also run their own guest house in Etseri: www.facebook.com/hanmer.house.svaneti