Georgia’s new leader has the West worried When you’ve got $6bn (£3.84bn) in the bank, it’s easy enough to speak your mind. But Georgia’s billionaire newish prime minister Bidzina Ivanishvili should perhaps be more circumspect. The man who made his fortune in Russia before deciding to turn his mind back home won a bad-tempered coalition drive to push out the pro-Western party of outgoing president Mikheil Saakashvili, pictured left, last year. Some in Western governments fear he wants to turn the country’s allegiances back to mother Russia. He counters that he wants to be friends with east and west and still wants Georgia to join the EU and Nato. But his government has detained dozens of Mr Saakashvili’s officials on corruption charges. Yesterday he said Mr Saakashvili himself could face the same fate for presiding over a country “smothered by corruption”. The US has already voiced concern at the arrests and will be rightly concerned by this latest outburst. If he is serious about keeping ties with the West, he should stop threatening to use the courts to silence his opposition. Such talk may wash with Moscow, but Western capitals might take a different view.
Posted on: Sat, 24 Aug 2013 17:43:45 +0000
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