A Tbilisi city court has sentenced Georgia’s imprisoned former president Mikheil Saakashvili to an additional nine years in jail for embezzlement of public funds.
According to the judge on March 12, Saakashvili embezzled several million Georgian lari – and spent the money, among other things, on luxury hotels, visits to beauty clinics and clothing.
He now has to remain in jail until at least 2030, on top of receiving a fine of more than €100,000 (300,000 lari)
Reacting to the sentence on X, Saakashvili’s official press office stressed that during his presidency, from 2004 until 2012, Georgia’s economy grew rapidly and that the World Bank even reported on how Georgia had defeated corruption.
The office post claimed that “the Russian Oligarch turned Georgia’s leader. Ivanishvili got the world’s former top prosecutors hired to explore the opportunity of whether one could be persecuted for corruption. The international experts came back empty-handed.”
According to Saakashvili’s X account, the expenses referenced by the court were based on official costs, including official foreign trips and hosting foreign leaders and prominent figures including Joseph Biden and Hillary Clinton.
“The case includes receipts for dinner and other expenses for hosting Donald Trump in Tbilisi and Batumi in 2012. It also includes payments for flowers delivered to the funerals of Polish president Lech Kaczynski and former Czech president Vaclav Havel,” he posted on March 12.
“It also has money spent for my medical treatment and official suits and other miscellaneous expenses. Prosecutors don’t claim that I appropriated any of these funds. It was clear from the very beginning that the case was purely political.”
“Unfortunately, today’s Georgia is no longer the regional role model it was under my leadership,” he added.
“It has descended under a corrupt dictatorship that is run by PRO-Russian oligarch. One has to remember that [Russian President Vladimir] Putin and other Russian leaders have demanded to get me jailed and Putin even publicly mentioned to hang me. ”
Saakashvili called on the international community to react and said the sentence against him was “an outrageous case of political persecution”. He added it happened after last year’s elections in Georgia were “stolen” by a regime that “rests on violence, political persecution, and manipulations”.
I was head of Executive power as president of Georgia for 8 years 2004-2012. In this Period Georgia's economy grew 4 times, Our State Budget increased 11 times, Pensions were raised 10 times. Georgia was the World's no 1 economic reformer, according to the World Bank.
Georgia had…— Mikheil Saakashvili (@SaakashviliM) March 12, 2025
The former president has been in prison since 2021, having been arrested after returning from exile in Ukraine, and sentenced to six years in prison for abuse of power.
Since his 2021 arrest, Saakashvili has spent most of his time in the hospital. He claimed to have been “physically and psychologically tortured systematically” while in prison but the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) found no evidence to support that.
He is also embroiled in two other trials. One over the alleged ordering the dispersal of anti-government protests in Tbilisi in 2007 and another for allegedly illegally entering the country in 2021.
Ukrainian citizen and former president of Georgia Mikheil Saakashvili appears very thin and unhealthy in the latest footage of him.
Ukraine is protesting against the inhumane treatment of Saakashvili, who is being held behind bars in Georgia and keeps on calling on the Georgian… pic.twitter.com/xaiOzqlrYN
— Natalka (@NatalkaKyiv) July 3, 2023
Saakashvili rose to power through the so-called Rose Revolution in 2003, one of the first so-called colour revolutions. They were a series of protests and attempts at regime changes in post-Soviet states to establish Western-style liberal democracies.
Such protests were strongly supported by NGOs, leading to accusations against the West of orchestrating them to expand its influence.
As president, United National Movement party member Saakashvili was strongly pro-Western and planned to seek Georgian membership of NATO and the European Union.
Towards the end of his term in office, he was accused of increasingly authoritarian behaviour.
Bidzina Ivanishvili, a billionaire often described as the de facto ruler of Georgia, is honorary chairman of the populist ruling Georgian Dream Party, which shifted away from the EU and ended the accession talks in November 2024.
Ever since, there has been a strong protest movement active in the country, with regular demonstrations against the ruling party.
The US and the European Union have urged a full investigation into reports of alleged voting violations following the disputed parliamentary election in Georgia. https://t.co/nEYBq8Rs7Q
— Brussels Signal (@brusselssignal) October 28, 2024
