During the third meeting with the press in three days, Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze said the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Jim O’Brien, who is scheduled to visit Tbilisi on May 14, requested a meeting with the honorary chairman of the Georgian Dream party Bidzina Ivanishvili, but that request was rejected by Ivanishvili. According to the Prime Minister, the issue of “sanctions” is at the heart of the problem.
Irakli Kobakhidze devoted much of his press conference to Ivanishvili and the purported sanctions against him. No legal or financial sanctions have been imposed on Ivanishvili by the U.S. or the European Union.
When asked whether possible sanctions against Ivanishvili would be grounds for dropping the law on foreign agents, Prime Minister Kobakhidze responded: “I would like to tell you that in recent months, there have been cases when Bidzina Ivanishvili refused to meet with other foreign diplomats and politicians.” He added, “The reason for the refusal was the same in all cases. Bidzina Ivanishvili said that he was already under de facto sanctions because he had frozen 2 billion [U.S.] dollars that he had entrusted to the West, but which turned up in the hands of the Global War Party.”
PM further said: “As soon as this blackmail and de facto sanctions end, any meeting can be held right away, but today, this is Bidzina Ivanishvili’s position on this topic. Therefore, just as such blackmail and threats did not fly since March 2022, when his funds were frozen after the war in Ukraine, neither will such blackmail and threats fly now. That is, no one can make Bidzina Ivanishvili take steps against the state by blackmail and threats. The sanctions in itself mean blackmail, the sanctions in themselves contains blackmail and threats, so it is not a serious topic considering all these circumstances.”
During his press conference, Prime Minister Kobakhidze repeated the old messages about protecting Georgian sovereignty, saying, “we won’t bow to Soviet-style instructions from abroad,” about the influence of the “global war party” on the EU and the U.S. and their plans in Georgia, and repeated his claim that more than 60% of the population support the law on foreign agents. Therefore, he said the Parliament would pass the law in the third and final reading at the plenary session of the Parliament.
Referring to the previous day’s rally, which was marred by sporadic extreme police brutality whereas police acts were assessed as “illegal and disproportional” by Georgian CSOs, he thanked the law enforcers for having “higher standards” than their EU and US counterparts when it came to dispersing rallies.
PM’s revelation about Ivanishvili’s refusal to meet with foreign partners was preceded by the Speaker Shalva Papuashvili’s statement at a briefing held on May 10 that he had rejected a request from the heads of the Parliaments’ foreign affairs committees of several countries, including “the Baltic countries, Germany, Poland, and Czechia,” who asked to meet with Papuashvili during their planned visit to Georgia on May 13. “I told them that it was not a good time for a visit,” Papuashvili said, citing the third hearing of the foreign agents bill in Parliament during the same period. The Speaker said the committee heads were still planning to come to Georgia, adding that he had warned them that “the radical opposition might take their visit here as an encouragement for radical actions.”
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