The Georgian oligarch puppet master
Bidzina Ivanishvili has spent much of the last decade gazing down at Tbilisi’s ancient rooftops from his glass castle, a home perched atop a hill that his critics say resembles a Bond villain’s lair.
Since his tenure as prime minister from 2012 to 2013, the secretive oligarch has largely exerted his influence from behind the scenes and is widely described by many Georgians as the country’s shadowy “puppet master”.
Last month, however, Ivanishvili made a rare public appearance at a pro-government rally to promote a highly controversial “foreign agent” law that has caused the biggest outbreak of unrest in Georgia in years.
His speech was laced with anti-western sentiments and conspiracy theories, underscoring the extent the small Caucasian country has pivoted away from the west under Ivanishvili’s guidance.
Opposition parties have long accused Ivanishvili, who made his fortune in Russia in the 1990s, of loyalties to Moscow, Georgia’s Soviet-era overlord, which still regards the south Caucasus as its back yard.
Ivanishvili left rural Georgia in the 1980s to attend university in Moscow, and although other students made fun of his village origins, he has said he understood something that they did not yet: that communism would collapse.
It helped him make his first financial success, selling computers in Russia. Like other future oligarchs at the time, he soon moved into banking and metals, acquiring Soviet-era state assets through privatisations on the cheap. His wealth is estimated at $6bn, a sum that exceeds Georgia’s state budget for 2021, though many of his income sources remain murky.
As he said once: “I could tell you anything and you wouldn’t be able to check it.”
When he returned to Georgia, he constructed the Tbilisi hill castle, as well as a series of lavish estates across the country. Still, he kept his identity a closely guarded secret, moving around in disguise and lavishing funding on artists or projects he decided he liked.
Ivanishvili spoke to the press for a brief period around 2012, when after years of living anonymously he announced he was running to be prime minister, setting up the Georgian Dream party and claiming he was fed up with the authoritarian bent of the then government.
In one interview, he arrived at his Black Sea estate in Batumi driving a golf cart playing Frank Sinatra’s My Way, and proceeded to give a tour of his collection of zebras, peacocks and other exotic animals while outlining a vision for Georgia.
At the time, he said: “I will be in the government for a year, or for two years maximum, and afterwards I will become an active member of society, to help society learn how to elect people and how to control their politicians. And make sure that there is a free press and a real opposition.”
Although he resigned from public office in 2013, his presence has continued to loom over the country’s politics.
“It is no secret that all the power is concentrated in Ivanishvili’s hands,” said Kornely Kakachia, the head of the Tbilisi-based thinktank the Georgian Institute of Politics.
Through the years, Ivanishvili has kept up his eccentric antics.
Angering environmentalists, he transformed a park by uprooting and transporting rare, immense trees from remote areas of Georgia to his arboretum in Ureki, a resort town on the Black Sea.
More troubling for many Georgians, however, has been his party’s plans to adopt the “foreign agents” law.
The bill has been described by Georgian protesters and western officials as a “Kremlin-inspired” tool to hound independent media and opposition voices in a country that has long teetered between the Russian and western spheres of influence but whose government now appears to be leaning towards Moscow.
The EU has made clear it would freeze Georgia’s membership application to the bloc if Tbilisi enacted the law.
Georgian Dream and Ivanishvili deny leaning towards Russia, and say the measures would increase transparency and defend Georgia’s sovereignty.
Russia is unpopular among ordinary Georgians, having supported armed separatists in the Moscow-backed breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia in the 1990s and again in 2008.
Those who have worked with Ivanishvili say he has grown more authoritarian and ambitious over the years.
“He loves control, he runs the country as his dollhouse,” said Tina Khidasheli, who served as Georgian defence minister in a Georgian Dream-led government from 2015 to 2016.
Khidasheli said Ivanishvili was aiming to implement the foreign agent law to further strengthen his grip on power before the parliament elections due in October.
“For him, it is all about keeping in power, everything he does is guided by it,” she said.
Khidasheli was troubled by Ivanishvili’s recent statements in which he bemoaned that western countries were being controlled by a secret global conspiracy that his government was successfully resisting. He went on to denounce the west as a “global party of war” that was attempting to drag Georgia into conflict with Russia.
“Ivanishvili always had a tendency for conspiracy theories,” the former minister said. “The problem is now that his views go completely unchecked.”
One of Ivanishvili’s fiercest critics is the incarcerated former president of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili, who accuses Ivanishvili of having him arrested on the Kremlin’s orders.
“Georgia has a long history of political vendettas,” said Kakachia, the political analyst. “Whoever comes to power tends to go after his predecessor,” he said.
This means, Kakachia said, Ivanishvili believes that staying in power is an “existential question”.
“It is about personal survival.”