David Kezerashvili: ‘Georgia is a proxy of the Russian state’

David Kezerashvili knows better than most what standing up to Russia entails. He helped to overthrow the Kremlin-aligned Georgian government during the 2003 Rose Revolution. Then he served as Georgia’s defence minister for two years including when Russia invaded in 2008. He eventually fled to London in 2012 when the Kremlin-backed Georgian Dream government accused him of embezzling $5.2 million in state funds. Seven criminal charges were levelled against him, including extortion and money laundering. None was upheld in court, until two years ago when the country’s Supreme Court overturned the embezzlement acquittal, sentencing him in absentia to ten years in prison.

When we meet in The Spectator’s offices, Kezerashvili, who owns Georgia’s pro-democracy television channel, Formula TV, insists the charges are trumped up, the result of a politically motivated campaign against him. Courts in both Britain and France have refused requests from Georgia to extradite him. ‘The ridiculous thing is that the [Supreme Court] judge who tried my case was the general prosecutor when the prosecutor’s office appealed my acquittal in 2018: it was the same person sitting on both trials,’ Kezerashvili says. ‘Without calling my defence, in a few hours they decided I was guilty.’

Kezerashvili, 44, says that his decision to meet me is ‘not without risk’. A week before our interview, Georgia’s former president Mikheil Saakashvili, who is serving six years for abuse of power (which he denies), passed a note to journalists from his prison hospital bed claiming he had been poisoned. ‘Vladimir Putin said at the time [of the Georgian war] that he will go after him. And that’s what we are seeing now.’

Saakashvili was referred to in a recent US State Department report as a ‘political prisoner’; two-thirds of the cabinet that served under him are in exile or living under the threat of jail time.