Bidzina Ivanishvili. Photo CC BY-SA 3.0: The Polish Senate / Wikipedia. Some rights reserved.When Bidzina Ivanishvili, Georgia’s richest man, first came to power, he promised to leave it as soon as possible. For many years, the billionaire, who made his money in Russia, was involved in charity at home. He paid the wages of Georgia’s intelligentsia. He built roads and churches. He financed the most successful, in his words, police reform in Georgia in recent history. And he did all this without the Georgian public ever knowing what he looked like.
In 2011, when Ivanishvili declared his decision to put an end to the rule of president Mikheil Saakashvili, Georgian journalists found it hard to find his photograph in their archives. Perhaps this anonymity contributed to a perception of Ivanishvili’s emergence as a sign from above – at least by a part of Georgian society who were tired of the social and economic problems they had faced under Saakashvili.
In 2013, Ivanishvili handed his post of prime minister to a successor before returning to a reclusive life in his home village. He concentrated on his interest in ancient trees, which he began buying up all over western Georgia to plant in his arboretum on the Black Sea. Indeed, this is how the transport of giant trees from one part of the country to another became a new genre of Georgian politics. The opposition has, on several occasions, published documents that explained how the logistics behind Ivanishvili’s new hobby has been paid for out of state funds. The authorities, however, continue to refute these accusations.
