The man who became a Georgian folk hero for taking over a payday lending office and demanding that the government reduce interest rates and drug companies’ profits has been convicted to seven years in prison.
Eurasianet reports that Levan Zurabashvili was sentenced to nine years in prison by first instance court, a sentence that was then reduced to seven years by the Court of Appeals in a January decision reclassifying the charges from hostage-taking to unlawful imprisonment. But many Georgians consider even the reduced sentence to be too strict given the context in which the crime happened.
On November 20, 2020, Zurabashvili walked into the Tbilisi office of a payday lending company, wielding what appeared to be a gun and grenade, and took 19 people captive. The authorities were already on edge: only a month earlier, an armed man had taken hostages in a bank in the western Georgian town of Zugdidi and eventually managed to escape with a ransom of $500,000.
The authorities’ failure to capture the Zugdidi robber left the country fearing copycat crimes, and that is what it initially appeared when the news about the lending office incident broke. But as the standoff was broadcast live on Georgian television, it became clear that this was a different sort of act.
Zurabashvili voiced political demands: a ban on gambling, lower medication prices, and the reduction of interest rates on bank loans. As the cameras rolled, some of his captives were heard cheerfully agreeing with his demands, in some cases even suggesting ways in which he could better formulate them. Zurabashvili eventually turned himself in, and the “weapons” he wielded turned out to be fake.
Zurabashvili captured many Georgians’ imaginations, earning widespread sympathy for voicing concerns that many ordinary people have but which are usually ignored by the country’s politicians. As information emerged about his family’s own financial struggles, funds were raised to help them out.
“How else can I speak up?” Zurabashvili would later ask in court. He made plain that his act was not a one-time emotional outburst, but rather a move to draw attention to problems that were not otherwise being addressed, and that he had no intention to physically harm anybody and was prepared to bear the legal consequences.
When news of his harsh sentencing hit, Georgians’ sympathy turned into protests. A group of activists and artists gathered on February 20 near the presidential residence calling for Zurabishvili to be pardoned. They criticized the justice system for treating him harshly while typically sparing those responsible for the economic plight he sought to call attention to.
“That person has been deprived of his freedom for a year and a half. I think this is enough time,” Vakhushti Menabde, a lawyer, said at the demonstration. “Even if we see it as a crime, we have to take into account everything that accompanied it – zero danger, socially worthy demands that deserve to be shared but are not on the political agenda.” Others at the demonstration compared the incident to performance art and radical, self-sacrificial forms of protest aimed at drawing attention to vital concerns.
But others see Zurabashvili as a terrorist and accuse his supporters of romanticizing crime while ignoring the potential trauma suffered by the hostages.
“Any act aimed at the unlawful restriction of individuals’ freedom in order to present certain demands and force others to comply with these demands constitutes in its essence a classical terror anatomy,” said Giorgi Noniashvili, an opposition politician from the European Georgia party, during a February 14 discussion on Formula TV.
The perspective of the hostages themselves remains the most controversial topic in the public discussion around the event. According to testimonies of some of them, obtained by media outlet Publika, the people taken captive did believe that his purported weaponry was real. But Zurabashvili did not act aggressively towards them, allowing women and those particularly vulnerable to walk out and the rest to take care of their various needs as the event unfolded.
During the months that followed the incident, discussions around the issues Zurabashvili had raised intensified. And the authorities have made some moves to address each one of them: the government relaxed pharmaceutical import regulations from Turkey in the hope of reducing the costs of medications, introduced various restrictions on gambling (even mooting an eventual ban on online casinos), and set a ceiling of 26 percent on interest rates for bank loans taken against pensions in an effort to relieve the country’s widespread problem of debt among the elderly.
In the meantime, the Supreme Court of Georgia is expected to hear Zurabashvili’s appeal of his sentencing.
