Badri Patarkatsishvili - Involvement in Politics

Involvement in Politics

Patarkatsishvili claimed to have helped Russian president Vladimir Putin to make his career. He had, he said, recommended Putin to Pavel Borodin, then a senior member of President Boris Yeltsin's Kremlin administration - and his business partner Boris Berezovsky, a Yeltsin insider, had got Putin appointed as Russian FSB director.

In late 2007, he became embroiled in a political scandal after former defense minister Irakli Okruashvili on September 25, 2007 accused Mikheil Saakashvili, the President of Georgia, of planning Patarkatsishvili's assassination. Arrested on corruption charges, however, Okruashvili retracted his accusations against the president, winning release on bail of 10 million Georgian lari (about 6,250,000 USD). He also said that his earlier accusations levelled against Saakashvili were not true and were aimed at gaining political dividends for himself and Badri Patarkatsishvili and at discrediting the President of Georgia. On November 6, Okruashvili, said on Patarkatsishvili's Imedi TV - by then managed by Fox TV's parent News Corporation - that he had been forced into retracting his accusations against Saakashvili by pressure that he endured in prison. Down the line from Munich, he said: "All of those accusations, all of those facts that I brought against Saakashvili, everything I said about him is the plain truth."

On October 29, 2007, he publicly announced his plans to finance ten opposition parties' campaign aimed at holding early parliamentary elections in April 2008. On November 2, 2007, he addressed a large anti-government rally held in downtown Tbilisi and pledged to further support it. He left Georgia for London shortly afterwards. After the demonstration turned violent, following police attacks, on November 7, 2007, Georgia's Chief Prosecutor's Office announced that he was suspected of conspiracy to overthrow the government. Nevertheless, he said he would run in the January 5, 2008 snap presidential elections under the slogan "Georgia without Saakashvili is Georgia without Terror." Leaders of the major opposition parties distanced themselves from Patarkatsishvili, who had to run as an independent presidential candidate.

On December 24 and 25, 2007, the prosecutor-general's office of Georgia released a series of audio and video recordings of the two separate meetings of the high-ranking Georgian Interior Ministry official Erekle Kodua with Patarkatsishvili and the head of his pre-election campaign Valeri Gelbakhiani. According to the government, Patarkatsishvili was trying to bribe Kodua to take part in what the Georgian officilas described as an attempted coup d'état on January 6, 2008, the next of the scheduled presidential elections. The plan included to stage a mass manifestation against the government and to "neutralize" the Interior Minister Vano Merabishvili. Later independent journalist Vakhtang Komakidze produced what he said was the full transcript of the recorded conversation which showed that Patarkatsishvili was advising against violence and the extracts released had been doctored The accusations forced Patarkatsishvili onto the defensive. He confirmed that he met with Kodua in London, but denied that the bribe was in connection to an alleged coup plot and claimed instead that his intention was to uncover what he said were official plans to rig the election. He also confirmed that he offered Kodua "a huge amount of money" in exchange for defecting from the authorities allegedly to avert a possible use of force by the government against the planned January rallies.

On December 28, 2007, Patarkatsishvili announced that he would withdraw his bid for presidency, but would nominally remain a candidate until January 4, 2008. On January 3, 2008, he reversed himself, however, and decided to run in presidential elections. In response, his top campaign official Giorgi Zhvania (brother of the late Prime Minister Zurab Zhvania) resigned, declaring that Patarkasishvili did not have the unquestionable reputation one would expect of a country's president.