Page 6 - GEORptJul18

2.0 Politics
2.1 Georgian ex-president Saakashvili given 6-year prison
sentence in absentia
The Tbilisi City Court has sentenced former Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili to six years in prison in a case concerning the beating of an opposition member of parliament.
Saakashvili was sentenced in absentia, having left Georgia after the end of his second presidential term in 2013. The Georgian authorities said they would seek his extradition after Saakashvili was sentenced to three years in prison earlier this year for seeking to cover up the murder of banker Sandro Girgvliani by interior ministry officials in a separate case.
The Tbilisi court found Saakashvili guilty of abuse of power and seeking to conceal evidence about the beating of Valeri Gelashvili back in 2005, the year after Saakashvili became president. Saakashvili has also been banned from holding any official position in Georgia for two years and three months.
The court said in a statement that the attack on Gelashvili was ordered after he published an article in the newspaper Resonance about Saakashvili’s personal life.
Former interior minister Ivane Merabishvili was sentenced in the same case in 2017, when he was found guilty of aggravated assault on Gelashvili. When announcing Merabishvili’s sentence, the Tbilisi City Court said that Saakashvili had initially asked Georgia’s then defence minister Irakli Okruashvili to orchestrate the attack on Gelashvili, but approached Merabishvili after the defence minister refused.
Describing the attack, the court said that members of the Special Forces Unit “took Valeri Gelashvili from the car together with his accompanying persons forcibly and by threatening with firearms, beat him severely with the butts of firearms and had unlawfully took from him the ‘Heckler Koch’ firearm being in legal ownership of Valeri Gelashvili, money — $10,000 and [a] ring, valued at GEL50,000.
“As a result of [the] beating, Valeri Gelashvili suffered grave bodily injuries,” it added. The former president has denied all the charges against him, which his supporters say are politically motivated.
Saakashvili has a dramatic and chequered political record since he came to power in the aftermath of Georgia’s Rose Revolution. He was hailed by Western leaders as a reformer as Tbilisi pursued radical anti-corruption reforms under his presidency and embarked on a resolutely pro-western course, seeking to bring his country closer to the EU and Nato — a course that brought tiny Georgia into direct conflict with regional power Russia in the five-day war of August 2008.
But his United National Movement lost power in the parliament to billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili’s newly created Georgian Dream party in 2012 and,
6 GEORGIA Country Report July 2018 www.intellinews.com