Owner of Georgian pro-government TV channel Imedi loses $130 million appeal in UK court

The owner of the Georgian pro-government TV channel Imedi, Irakli Rukhadze, and his business partners have been ordered to pay $130 million plus interest following a lengthy legal dispute in the UK.

On Wednesday, the UK Supreme Court dismissed a final appeal by Rukhadze and his partners, upholding the verdicts against them in the lower courts.

The dispute revolved around a contract to recover the assets of the late opposition figure and billionaire Badri Patarkatsishvili following his sudden death in 2008.

Patarkatsishvili’s family initially hired companies owned by Patarkatsishvili’s former chief financier, Eugene Jaffe, to recover his assets, which had been spread across numerous jurisdictions in an often opaque manner.

Rukhadze, along with his business partners Benjamin Marson and Igor Alekseev, left companies belonging to Jaffe in 2011 to form their own firm, Hunnewell Partners, which the Patarkatsishvili family then contracted to recover the assets.

The UK High Court ruled in 2018 that the three had resigned in bad faith, and had breached their fiduciary duties to Jaffe’s companies, in which they held senior positions.

The courts ruled the three had formed a conspiracy, acting together with a common plan to take over the opportunity to recover Patarkatsishvili’s assets from Jaffe’s companies while they were still employed by him. They additionally ruled the three had misused confidential information from these companies to negotiate with the Patarkatsishvili family.

In their rulings, the courts found that the three had profited some $170 million from the recovery, but ruled 25% of this should be deducted due to the work they had carried out in recovering Patarkatsishvili’s assets.

Georgian business tycoon Arkadi ‘Badri’ Patarkatsishvili, widely hailed as ‘the richest man in Georgia’, died in his home in Surrey, England, in February 2008.

Patarkatsishvili was living in exile to evade charges of plotting to overthrow Georgia’s ex-president Mikheil Saakashvili’s government. He had taken part in the 2007 mass anti-government demonstrations and participated in the 2008 presidential election, coming third with 7% of the vote.

Among his business interests, Patarkatsishvili founded the Georgian TV channel Imedi in 2003, which was fiercely critical of Saakashvili’s rule until the government raided and appropriated the channel in 2007.

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Third Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili (2004–2013) stands accused of ordering a crackdown on anti-government protests and raiding TV station Imedi. Minutes after 07:00 on the morning of 7 November 2007, Georgian police units cleared around 200 protesters from outside Parliament, triggering…

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After the Patarkatsishvili family regained ownership of the channel in 2012, Rukhadze’s Hunnewell Partners took control of the channel in 2018, completing the purchase in 2021.

Rukhadze is an outspoken supporter of the ruling Georgian Dream party. Since 2012, Imedi has been broadly supportive of the government, and in recent years has refused to criticise the ruling party.

Rukhadze has emphasised that the channel would remain ‘on [Bidzina] Ivanishvili’s side’ as long as there was an ‘opposing side’, adding that if Imedi did criticise Georgian Dream, this would lead to ‘the person I fear the most’ returning to power, referring to former President Mikheil Saakashvili.

On Wednesday, Rukhadze said he wanted to buy the assets of RFE/RL’s Georgia office.

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TV Imedi has a stated goal — to prevent the opposition from gaining power — a goal former employees say has overtaken all questions of ethics.

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