Former Ivanishvili confidant flees Georgia and vows to ‘expose’ him

Giorgi Bachiashvili, former aide to Georgian Dream’s founder Bidzina Ivanishvili, has announced that he has fled Georgia and threatened to produce an ‘exposé’ about the billionaire.

Bachiashvili, who was already facing two criminal cases at the time of departure, said he decided to leave the country due to safety risks, but vowed to continue his fight against the billionaire founder of the ruling party.

Bachiashvili served as the general director of the Georgian Co-Investment Fund — founded by Ivanishvili in 2013 shortly after coming to power — until 2019, when he moved to the position of chair of the fund’s advisory board.

Once close partners, their paths diverged in recent years, accompanied by investigations against Bachiashvili — both of which involve Ivanishvili — which he considered politically motivated.

‘I would have been completely defenceless in prison, face to face with Ivanishvili’s executioners’, Bachiashvili wrote in a Facebook post announcing his departure on Tuesday.

On the same day, he appeared live on the opposition-leaning TV Pirveli’s evening talk show, where he stated he had information suggesting the court was planning to issue a verdict against him the following Monday.

According to him, the head of one of the law enforcement agencies — whose identity Bachiashvili did not specify — had been told by Ivanishvili that they will ‘smash him in prison, and then we’ll see how he sings from there’.

Despite repeated questioning by the host, Bachiashvili, who holds both Georgian and Russian citizenship, did not reveal how he managed to leave Georgia, given that he had been banned from leaving the country as part of the investigation. However, he added that he used ‘loopholes in the system, including people’, to escape Georgia.

‘The system is broken, it’s only focused on monitoring protesters’, Bachiashvili said, referring to the situation within law enforcement agencies, including the protection of state borders.

‘Today, the borders are in such a state that you can cross them on foot, by bike, on horseback, or with an airplane’, he added.

On Wednesday, the Interior Ministry released an official statement on Bachiashvili’s departure, claiming that that the former Ivanishvili aide ‘secretly crossed the border into Armenia on 2 March, bypassing the official border checkpoint by using a specially equipped hiding spot in a vehicle’.

‘Afterward, at the Armenian border checkpoint, he presented another passport issued in his name by [Russia], which allowed him to cross the border’, the statement added.

However, Bachiashvili had previously stated on TV Pirveli that both of his passports were already confiscated by investigators.

One of Bachiashvili’s lawyers, Levan Makharashvili, told RFE/RL that he also learned about his client’s departure from the Facebook post. According to Makharashvili, before seeing the post, he had believed that Bachiashvili would appear as usual at his next court hearing, scheduled for Tuesday morning in one of the criminal cases against him.

According to the Interior Ministry, a criminal case has been launched against Bachiashvili on charges of illegally crossing the border. A court hearing on this case was already held on Wednesday, and the judge ordered pre-trial detention for Bachiashvili in absentia.

At the same time, the court ordered that Bachiashvili’s previous bail of ₾2.5 million ($900,000), set as a preventive measure in one of his earlier cases, be replaced with pre-trial detention.

A day later, on Thursday, the ministry announced that one person had been detained on charges of assisting Bachiashvili in illegally crossing the border.

Bachiashvili’s announcement of leaving the country sparked harsh reactions from the ruling party, with Georgian Dream MP Irakli Kadagishvili calling him a ‘hole-crawler’, while MP Lado Bozhadze warned that Bachiashvili wouldn’t escape from the Georgian police and advised him ‘not to sleep at night’.

‘I announce a full exposé of Bidzina’

In his Facebook post, Bachiashvili said that ‘Ivanishvili’s regime has completely deviated from the principles of law and democracy’.

‘So my departure is not a retreat, but rather the only sane solution’, he stated.

On TV Pirveli, Bachiashvili added that he will make all efforts to make sure that the international community ‘understands exactly who Ivanishvili is, especially in the US [where] I have the most friends’.

‘I announce a full exposé of Bidzina in what he has not yet been exposed for. The audience will see this very well at the right time and place’, Bachiashvili stated.

He also said that the information he has had ‘been taken out of the country a long time ago, and Ivanishvili knew this very well’.

Bachiashvili did not specify what kind of information he had.

The illegal border crossing charges are the third criminal charges pressed against Bachiashvili.

The first case against him was initiated in 2023 following a statement by Ivanishvili, accusing Bachiashvili of illegally appropriating ₿8,253.13 — worth around $40 million at the time, according to the investigation — and money laundering.

According to the investigation, Bachiashvili had purchased the bitcoins using investments made by Ivanishvili but allegedly did not return the profits from those investments to Georgian Dream’s founder. In July of the same year, Tbilisi City Court released on a bail of ₾2.5 million ($900,000).

The second case against the former Co-Investment Fund head was launched in February this year, with the General Prosecutor’s Office accusing him of failing to fulfill or improperly fulfilling his official duties, which allegedly led to severe consequences.

This case was related to the Mtkvari Hydropower Plant project, a Co-Investment Fund initiative launched in 2014. According to the investigation, the project’s budget had nearly doubled compared to initial estimates, but it still remained unfinished. The prosecution claims that Bachiashvili, in his role as the fund’s executive director, failed to properly assess and manage the project’s associated risks.

In this case, the court ordered a bail of ₾50,000 ($17,900) for Bachiashvili.

Diverging paths

Bachiashvili rejected the validity of both charges pressed against him.

In the first case, he stated that what the prosecutor referred to as an investment was actually a loan, and Ivanishvili had simply lent him money from his Cartu Bank.

In the second case, Bachiashvili claimed that ‘there is no evidence whatsoever’ and, moreover, the statute of limitations for the case had expired.

Ivanishvili and Bachiashvili have different versions regarding when their paths diverged, with Ivanishvili’s lawyer stating that Bachiashvili was once ‘very close’ to the billionaire and enjoyed his ‘special trust’.

Ivanishvili’s side attributed the conflict to Bachiashvili’s dishonesty, while Bachiashvili claims that their partnership ended due to political and ideological disagreements.

In November of this year, Bachiashvili told the media that the first disagreement occurred following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, when he refused to participate in the ruling party’s ‘anti-Western narratives and propaganda’, after which Ivanishvili’s trust in him began to fade.

According to Bachiashvili, Ivanishvili wanted him to publish letters about the ‘Global War Party’ — a conspiracy theory of Georgian Dream, alleging that certain external forces were attempting to involve Georgia in the war and open a ‘second front’ against Russia.

Additionally, Bachiashvili said that he disagreed with Ivanishvili in a claim that the dispute between Georgian Dream’s founder and the Swiss banking giant Credit Suisse was part of the broader battle by the West against Ivanishvili. Bachiashvili said that he was in charge of the dispute with the Swiss bank and knows that the claim about the West is ‘craziness’.

Against the backdrop of legal disputes, Bachiashvili repeatedly appeared in the media and courts, criticising Georgian Dream’s rule and recalling experiences he claimed to have had during his time working with Ivanishvili. Among other things, he asserted that Georgian judges and prosecutors frequently visited Ivanishvili, in an allusion to the ruling party’s influence on the judiciary.

Additionally, Bachiashvili accused Ivanishvili of extortion, stating that after the criminal case was initiated against him, the founder of Georgian Dream, through an intermediary, demanded a payment of ₿5,000. In response, Ivanishvili's lawyer stated that this was not extortion but an attempt at reconciliation, which he described as ‘a completely healthy phenomenon’.

Bachiashvili’s statements were followed by harsh criticism from representatives of the ruling party and individuals associated with it.

In one such instance, pro-government philosopher Zaza Shatirishvili suggested that Bachiashvili had been ‘recruited’ by US intelligence services to fight against Ivanishvili, who, according to Shatirishvili, was ‘principally unacceptable to Washington’ because he had defeated ‘agentocracy’ in Georgia.

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OC MediaYousef Bardouka