One brilliantly sunny morning in January, a Ford SUV took me to Chorvila, the remote mountain town in central Georgia where Bidzina Ivanishvili was born. While the surrounding area is all mud and poverty, Chorvila’s streets are clean and lined with neat rows of two-storey homes in pastel stucco with bright red roofs. Many residents, especially the sick, the disabled, the orphaned and families with many children, get generous monthly stipends. There’s free medical care, free TVs and VCRs and, for 17,000 fortunate people, free gas stoves.
All of it—the home building, stipends, health care, TVs, stoves, plus 40 rebuilt schools and a renovated hospital—have been paid for by Ivanishvili. The largest employer in the area is Ivanishvili. My driver works for Ivanishvili. Just about any thing new we drove by, including a house that belongs to the woman who does Ivanishvili’s wife’s nails, one of my guides proudly pointed to and said, “Bidzina built that.” At Chorvila’s heart is Ivanishvili’s contemporary castle, his old place carved into the cliffs, with massive windows facing the Racha Mountains. It has a huge athletic complex and a zoo with ring-tailed lemurs, deer, flamingos, penguins and a kangaroo the caretaker kicked out into the cold to show me it exists.
Ivanishvili, 56, has built Chorvila into what amounts to an alpine fiefdom smack in the middle of the country. Almost everyone I met, as if they were warned an American journalist was coming to visit, was wearing a political campaign T-shirt or a scarf with a heptagonal star, symbol of Ivanishvili’s new political party, Georgian Dream.
“It is a feudal town,” boasts Vazhe Gavasheli, a security expert with Ivanishvili’s construction company.
The best way to fathom the influence and impact Bidzina Ivanishvili has in the former Soviet republic of Georgia would be to imagine that a businessman worth $8 trillion—Ivanishvili’s $6 billion net worth is half of Georgia’s GDP—had established a statewide system of philanthropic patronage in, say, West Virginia and the whole state was subservient to him. He has paid to repair the state university in Tbilisi and refurbish its biggest theatres. His name is on national parks, ski resorts and medical clinics.
Now that he is running for prime minister, it’s enough to make any sitting president, let alone Georgia’s volatile, jealous, power-hungry Mikheil Saakashvili, feel threatened.
Five months ago, Ivanishvili announced he was going to form Georgian Dream to put up candidates in the country’s parliamentary elections scheduled for the fall. In his opening salvo he accused Saakashvili, a darling of the West, of consolidating a “total monopoly” on political power in the eight years since he came to power in the peaceful Rose Revolution in 2003. Ivanishvili used to be one of Saakashvili’s biggest political and financial supporters. Three years ago, the two most powerful men in the country broke off their relationship. Ivanishvili says he and his people have been harassed by the government ever since. His decision to enter politics and become a public citizen may just be for his own protection. But Ivanishvili has an even more fundamental quibble with Saakashvili, and it is a quintessentially Georgian one. “He doesn’t understand what love is,” he says, completely seriously. “How can a person like that rule a country?”
Ivanishvili’s announcement shocked Tbilisi. Georgians instantly projected their hopes of a freer, more prosperous country onto him. Saakashvili is widely credited with bringing prosperity and calm in his first five years, but Georgia’s lifeblood of foreign direct investment has yet to return to the levels reached prior to its skirmish with Russia in 2008, mostly because it no longer has diplomatic ties with its closest and most logical trade partner.
“In the last couple of years there’s been a perception that we’re sliding back. Funds are starting to dry up; not much effort is being made to rebuild the economy,” says Esben Emborg, the chairman of the local branch of the American Chamber of Commerce.
Before he announced his run, few people in Georgia had ever really seen Ivanishvili. He had given few interviews, and photographic evidence of him was scarce. He was said to have albino children, to travel everywhere by helicopter, to have thrown a school reunion and left a key to a new car under everyone’s napkin. Much of the city’s intelligentsia was on his payroll, maybe even the police. He made his money, the stories went, by moving to Russia, changing his name to Boris Ivanov and selling pillowcases to the Turks. Or was it computers? Or was it in gold mining? He had a massive house—or was it a business centre?—in the mountains overlooking Tbilisi, but what went on up there? Saakashvili once called him “the Count of Monte Cristo.”
Years of hiding from the spotlight prepared him poorly for his political debut. Three days after Ivanishvili unveiled his Georgian Dream, he and his wife had their Georgian citizenship revoked. Three weeks later, an Ivanishvili bank was raided by the government.
Read more: http://forbesindia.com/article/ideas-opinions/richest-man-of-georgia-is-worth-half-his-countrys-gdp/32582/1#ixzz1qBvlAoqR
All of it—the home building, stipends, health care, TVs, stoves, plus 40 rebuilt schools and a renovated hospital—have been paid for by Ivanishvili. The largest employer in the area is Ivanishvili. My driver works for Ivanishvili. Just about any thing new we drove by, including a house that belongs to the woman who does Ivanishvili’s wife’s nails, one of my guides proudly pointed to and said, “Bidzina built that.” At Chorvila’s heart is Ivanishvili’s contemporary castle, his old place carved into the cliffs, with massive windows facing the Racha Mountains. It has a huge athletic complex and a zoo with ring-tailed lemurs, deer, flamingos, penguins and a kangaroo the caretaker kicked out into the cold to show me it exists.
Ivanishvili, 56, has built Chorvila into what amounts to an alpine fiefdom smack in the middle of the country. Almost everyone I met, as if they were warned an American journalist was coming to visit, was wearing a political campaign T-shirt or a scarf with a heptagonal star, symbol of Ivanishvili’s new political party, Georgian Dream.
“It is a feudal town,” boasts Vazhe Gavasheli, a security expert with Ivanishvili’s construction company.
The best way to fathom the influence and impact Bidzina Ivanishvili has in the former Soviet republic of Georgia would be to imagine that a businessman worth $8 trillion—Ivanishvili’s $6 billion net worth is half of Georgia’s GDP—had established a statewide system of philanthropic patronage in, say, West Virginia and the whole state was subservient to him. He has paid to repair the state university in Tbilisi and refurbish its biggest theatres. His name is on national parks, ski resorts and medical clinics.
Now that he is running for prime minister, it’s enough to make any sitting president, let alone Georgia’s volatile, jealous, power-hungry Mikheil Saakashvili, feel threatened.
Five months ago, Ivanishvili announced he was going to form Georgian Dream to put up candidates in the country’s parliamentary elections scheduled for the fall. In his opening salvo he accused Saakashvili, a darling of the West, of consolidating a “total monopoly” on political power in the eight years since he came to power in the peaceful Rose Revolution in 2003. Ivanishvili used to be one of Saakashvili’s biggest political and financial supporters. Three years ago, the two most powerful men in the country broke off their relationship. Ivanishvili says he and his people have been harassed by the government ever since. His decision to enter politics and become a public citizen may just be for his own protection. But Ivanishvili has an even more fundamental quibble with Saakashvili, and it is a quintessentially Georgian one. “He doesn’t understand what love is,” he says, completely seriously. “How can a person like that rule a country?”
Ivanishvili’s announcement shocked Tbilisi. Georgians instantly projected their hopes of a freer, more prosperous country onto him. Saakashvili is widely credited with bringing prosperity and calm in his first five years, but Georgia’s lifeblood of foreign direct investment has yet to return to the levels reached prior to its skirmish with Russia in 2008, mostly because it no longer has diplomatic ties with its closest and most logical trade partner.
“In the last couple of years there’s been a perception that we’re sliding back. Funds are starting to dry up; not much effort is being made to rebuild the economy,” says Esben Emborg, the chairman of the local branch of the American Chamber of Commerce.
Before he announced his run, few people in Georgia had ever really seen Ivanishvili. He had given few interviews, and photographic evidence of him was scarce. He was said to have albino children, to travel everywhere by helicopter, to have thrown a school reunion and left a key to a new car under everyone’s napkin. Much of the city’s intelligentsia was on his payroll, maybe even the police. He made his money, the stories went, by moving to Russia, changing his name to Boris Ivanov and selling pillowcases to the Turks. Or was it computers? Or was it in gold mining? He had a massive house—or was it a business centre?—in the mountains overlooking Tbilisi, but what went on up there? Saakashvili once called him “the Count of Monte Cristo.”
Years of hiding from the spotlight prepared him poorly for his political debut. Three days after Ivanishvili unveiled his Georgian Dream, he and his wife had their Georgian citizenship revoked. Three weeks later, an Ivanishvili bank was raided by the government.
Read more: http://forbesindia.com/article/ideas-opinions/richest-man-of-georgia-is-worth-half-his-countrys-gdp/32582/1#ixzz1qBvlAoqR
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