Giorgi Bachiashvili is on the run. The urbane 39-year-old slipped a surveillance team two months ago to flee his home in Tbilisi,Georgia, midway through a trial at which he was destined to be sentenced to 11 years in jail.
An Interpol red notice has been requested by the Georgian authorities asking law enforcement to find and arrest him over a $42m crime, and he further claims to have been informed by the intelligence services of two countries that there is an active plot to kill him. “Groups from the northern Caucasus, most likely Chechens,” he said.
For more than a decade, Bachiashvili worked for Bidzina Ivanishvili, the reclusive billionaire who as the honorary chair of the Georgian Dream party is widely regarded as the de facto leader of Georgia, ruling from a hilltop glass business centre and residence in Tbilisi.
In December last year, Ivanishvili was put under US economic sanctions for “undermining the democratic and Euro-Atlantic future of Georgia for the benefit of the Russian Federation”.
He was further accused by the US of overseeing the violent repression of hundreds of thousands of people protesting on the streets of Tbilisi over his turn against the west and seeming alignment of Georgia with Moscow, the place he first made his fortune after the breakup of the Soviet Union.
Bachiashvili said he was the businessman-cum-politician’s “closest person, right-hand man”.
“Consigliere, I would not say,” he added. “As consiglieri do the shady stuff as well.”
Arguably few people have a more intimate understanding of the enigmatic mind of Ivanishvili, Georgia’s richest man, who was once an advocate of European Union membership.
It is Ivanishvili who is today driving the hunt to jail Bachiashvili, the latter said, following a spectacular falling out. Bachiashvili has asked the Guardian for the location of the interview to be kept a secret due to fears for his safety.
His account, albeit one from someone who has a grievance and is on the run, offers perhaps the most telling insight yet into the mentality of the man accused of bringing Georgia back into the Russian sphere, three and a half decades after the fall of the Soviet Union.
“He will sacrifice the land, any interest for his personal wellbeing and security,” claimed Bachiashvili.
Bachiashvili started working on real estate deals in the Moscow office of one of Ivanishvili’s companies in 2011 after his mother, a renowned eye doctor in Georgia, had mentioned to one of her regular clients her pride at her son’s success at a business school in France. The patient was Ivanishvili’s mother; her son was with her at the time and looking to recruit bright young things for his growing business and political empire.
It was Bachiashvili, in advance of Ivanishvili’s election as prime minister in October 2012, who helped sell his boss’s Russian assets, which were regarded as an obstacle to electoral success given Putin’s 2008 invasion in the north of the country.
At the age of 26, Bachiashvili was appointed deputy chief executive of Georgia’s sovereign wealth fund – a position that placed him “always by [Ivanishvili’s] side” – and soon tasked unofficially with liaising with the bankers managing the then prime minister’s private wealth, he said.
The 2016, Panama papers leak revealed that Ivanishvili had not disclosed he owned a company managed by Mossack Fonseca, a since-shuttered Panamanian law firm, but the company’s purpose remained a mystery.
“It was owning and managing his [$1.3bn] arts portfolio stored in New York and London,” Bachiashvili said of the company, Lynden Management Ltd, which was one of his responsibilities. “In 2022, he brought all of this art back to Georgia [because of the fear of sanctions], and in order to avoid the paying the custom duties and fees and the property tax, and in the near future, the profit tax from sales of these art pieces he enacted an offshore law … Like, that’s $400m he’s just taken out of the pocket of Georgia.”
Ivanishvili’s lawyer described this claim as “outright lies”, adding: “Using an offshore zone in itself is no crime.”
During these early years, Bachiashvili had also set up a private equity fund for Ivanishvili in the Cayman Islands with the assets held in Luxembourg. This became Bachiashvili’s focus after Ivanishvili, said to be uncomfortable in a public role, stood down as prime minister in 2013. But there was little change in the way the country was run, Bachiashvili said.
The relationship between Ivanishvili and Georgia’s various prime ministers remained that of an “angry boss and a stupid employee”, Bachiashvili said.
“I was maybe the most regular guest in the Ivanishvili residence, in his business centre,” he said. “I would see prime ministers, judges, prosecutor general, ministers of interior, everybody walking to his meetings like employees. He would sometimes yell at them, sometimes call them worthless. It’s just like a sultan and his servants.”
Ivanishvili’s lawyer described this claim as a “groundless attempt to discredit Mr Ivanishvili”.
The tycoon had some other peccadilloes. He is known in Georgia for his collection of zebras, peacocks and other exotic animals. There were sharks and dolphins, said Bachiashvili. He had a habit of ripping up ancient tall trees from around Georgia for his private arboretum at his summer residence in Ureki, one of four homes in the country. “He has to own something to love it – that’s his worldview,” said Bachiashvili. The trees were regarded as a source of life energy, he said.
“He was obsessed with his mortality,” said Bachiashvili. “He’s doing all these experimental, crazy procedures, such as stem cell transplants and all these crazy voodoo things. His voodoo master, Yulia Krushanova, lives with him.”
Krushanova, who describes herself as an “anti-ageing medicine specialist”, is reportedly married to a Russian intelligence officer, but this could not be independently verified.
Ivanshivili’s lawyer denied that a “voodoo doctor” lived with him. He said: “These statements by Bachiashvili are absurd. I can assure you that no doctor lives with him, much less with ‘occult’ deviations, and no experiments are held.”
Krushanova did not respond to a request for comment.
Ivanishvili could blow hot and cold, Bachiashvili added, but he evidently enjoyed his financially lucrative work. “I’m not there to change [him], I’m there to do my job, which I was doing, I think, very well,” Bachiashvili said.
It was in this role that Bachiashvili discovered that an adviser at Credit Suisse, Patrice Lescaudron, was sending them “cooked books” to hide his theft of hundreds of millions of dollars of Ivanishvili’s funds. He led a successful legal battle in multiple jurisdictions to get some of the money back.
Meanwhile, allegations of a rigged election in 2020 triggered concerns in the European parliament about a concentration of power in Ivanishvili’s hands in a country that was on path to accession to the EU.
Ivanishvili, who left Moscow in 2003, remained clear in private that Georgia’s path was with the west, while still maintaining cordial relations with Putin. Then in February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine.
Bachiashvili, who was by then spending more time in the US and on his own investments, including in cryptocurrency, said: “He started telling me, ‘I think this Credit Suisse saga is not actually Credit Suisse, but it’s some external forces like the Americans trying to strip me of my money and take it as a ransom for Georgia to go into war with Russia.’ I told him it didn’t make sense.
“He would spend sometimes 30, sometimes 40 minutes on the call with me, especially while I was in the US, just airing his views on it, saying that he’s ‘such a type of person that even if you hold the gun up his head, he would not subdue to such things’. I thought, why is this guy talking to me about this for 40 minutes on the phone every day? Then I realised, he thinks that our line is tapped. He would sometimes say, ‘Yeah, and tell your friends that I’m of this opinion.’”
The Georgian government then started talking about the US and the EU as being part of a “global war party”.
Bachiashvili said: “I think that up until 2022 he had an illusion that Georgia would enter the EU under Ivanishvili’s shadow grip. It became evident that the EU will not accept Georgia with this sort of autocratic power.”
A move towards Putin was the solution, he suggests. Ivanishvili’s lawyer called this claim groundless and said it was under Ivanishvili that Georgia became an EU candidate state.
Bachiashvili posted pro-Ukrainian messages on his Instagram account at the start of the war, which prompted a call from Ivanishvili, he claimed. “It was the first time he was really out of his mind,” he said. “He was yelling, he was threatening. The message was basically, ‘You better stay quiet. You need to know your place.’”
Ivanishvili’s lawyer denied that this conversation took place.
The tide had turned. And a bitcoin deal would be Bachiashvili’s downfall.
He had tried to get Ivanishvili interested in investing in cryptocurrency over the years but without success, Bachiashvili said. In 2015, he said he approached Ivanishvili again, but for a loan for a bitcoin investment he wished to make.
Ivanishvili directed him to the bank he owned, CartuBank. A $5m loan was agreed by the bank with the caveat that the institution would reap 30% of the profits from investing the money in bitcoin, Bachiashvili said. After a year, Bachiashvili repaid the loan in full, plus the agreed kicker for the bank, he claimed.
In May, 2023, Ivanishvili called to thank Bachiashvili for the latest win in the Credit Suisse legal case. But a few days later, Bachiashvili was invited to attend an interview with a prosecutor, nominally about an investigation into a hydropower plant, he said.
Bitcoin was top of the agenda. Ivanishvili was claiming that he had done “what a father would not do for a son”, according to his witness statement, by being a $5m investor in the bitcoin deal.
The allegation was that Bachiashvili had falsely claimed to have sold the bitcoins but instead kept them, reaping the rewards of their soaring value, and in effect stealing $42.7m in profits owed to Ivanishvili.
The sole communication to Bachiashvili from his former mentor on the day of his first interrogation, he said, was a WhatsApp message to advise him to “talk to your lawyer”.
His world was crumbling around him.
Bachiashvili was put on criminal trial in January this year on charges of misappropriating Ivanishvili’s funds and money laundering.
An offer was put to his lawyers that the criminal complaint would be dropped if he agreed to stump up 60% of the allegedly misappropriated bitcoins. The demand would rise by 5% for each month that he failed to agree.
Bachiashvili would not fold to what he claims was extortion. Ivanshivili’s lawyer confirmed the offer but responded: “I believe that, with the parties coming to an agreement, and the plaintiff informing law enforcements of the absence of claims, the situation of Bachiashvili as a suspect in a crime could be much easier.”
Bachiashvili claimed the trial was a foregone conclusion. “I think it’s one of the very few cases in the world where the claimant, the judge, the chief justices and the chief prosecutor all are sanctioned,” he said.
Transparency International has described the case as being “devoid of both legal and factual grounds”. Ivanshivili’s lawyer said the NGO harboured “clearly defined political sympathies and objectives”.
Two weeks before the verdict, Bachiashvili decided to flee.
Bachiashvili said: “I got a message from one of the guys in the state security services that Ivanishvili has said that, ‘I will crush him in jail and I will make him do what I want.’”
Ivanshivili’s lawyer described the claim as “just yellow press-level [tabloid] gossiping”.
The escape was well-planned. For months, Bachiashvili had been making regular visits to a border region called Kakheti, in order to convince the security services that were surveilling him that this was normal behaviour.
On the evening of 2 March, he told his driver and security man that he wished to go to Kakheti but that he would need to be dropped off halfway there to meet a journalist alone and in secret.
“I jumped off from the car, so that the surveillance was a bit far, you know, behind a corner and I went through a building to a waiting car,” he said. He left his phone in a bag in the back of the car so that those tracking him would follow a false trail.
Bachiashvili had been forced to surrender his Georgian and Russian passports. But the Russian document had lapsed and weeks earlier he had secretly applied for a renewal.
It was this he used at the Armenian border crossing and then at the airport to get a 5am flight to Qatar. He had advised his parents and sister and her family to take a holiday out of the country at the time, and so they were safe.
“It’s not easy, because you’re basically leaving everything behind. You don’t know whether you will be successful. [But] I knew that basically I was going to die in jail.”
While in exile, he has been talking to various governments about his future, and it was during one of these discussions, he claimed, that he was advised of a death threat. “They told me that it’s not that they see a risk, but it’s that they know that it’s actually been ordered,” he said. He does not believe that Ivanishvili is behind it.
He said: “My fear is that it could be coming from secret services or some forces from some country that would want Ivanishvili to become more vulnerable. If they can hang a killing on him then there is [a] much lesser chance that he’ll be able to have normal dialogue with the US or he will be more on a hook.”
Bachiashvili, who intends to appeal against his conviction, believes Ivanishvili turned on him because he concluded that he could no longer be trusted to do his bidding, and that he may even be a western spy.
“Ivanishvili’s grip on this power is existential for him,” he said. “He is fighting for his life. He’s like a machine only working in favour of his reptilian desires. And that desire is to stay alive.”