The script could be lifted straight from a James Bond film. A billionaire oligarch with the nickname ‘Boa Constrictor’ quietly suffocates a nation state.
Over 12 years he corrupts everything he touches, turning a ‘beacon of democracy’ into his personal fiefdom, before dragging it into the dark clutches of Russia. By the time the people have noticed – it’s too late.
All this, of course, conducted from his hilltop lair where he ritually humiliates his minions in front of a tank filled with sharks.
Sound implausible? Then meet Bidzina Ivanishvili, the cold, calculating recluse who rules the Black Sea nation of Georgia from the shadows.
Last summer he succeeded in defying his people to move the fiercely pro-Western nation towards Moscow’s sphere – and this month he appears set to hand Vladimir Putin one of his greatest ever victories.
Bidzina Ivanishvil is a former president who founded and still controls the political party Georgia Dream which has had control of the country for the last decade
View of the compound of the Georgian billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili above Tbilisi, Georgia
A woman waves Georgian national flag as she protests the ‘foreign influence’ law crowd outside the parliament building in central Tbilisi on May 28, 2024
Ivanishvili’s government finally pushed through a ‘foreign agents’ law in May following weeks of violence where masked government thugs beat opponents to within inches of death.
The legislation requires all NGOs and media organisations that receive over 20 per cent of funding from abroad to register as foreign agents – literally ‘spies’ in Georgian.
On the surface, the increasingly autocratic government of a small, distant country simply passed a draconian bill that will clamp down on opponents to win the Georgian elections on October 26.
But those that know Ivanishvili best warn it is part of a bigger plot by Putin designed to crush Ukrainian morale, undermine Western sanctions, and usher in the USSR 2.0.
Now, helped by a total failure of European backbone, he stands on the cusp of succeeding.
So, who is Georgia’s shadow ruler – and why does this nation home to just 3.7million people on Russia’s southern border matter?
Today Daily Mail pieces together his stranger-than-fiction story and a sinister plot that should sound alarm bells across the civilised world.
Having grown up in abject poverty in Chorvila, a tiny village in western Georgia, Ivanishvili moved to Russia to make his $7 billion fortune as one of the original oligarchs during the ‘wild’ 1990s.
Here he earned his nickname, ‘Udav’, meaning ‘Boa Constrictor’ in Russian, a nod to how he would ruthlessly suffocate rival businesses.
He returned to his homeland in the early noughties just as it threw off the shackles of post-Soviet leadership with the 2003 Rose Revolution to become the most pro-Western nation in the region.
Georgia’s aversion to Russian imperialism was cemented following Putin’s 2008 invasion where he seized two breakaway regions in a precursor to the war with Ukraine.
Who is Georgia’s shadow ruler – and why does this nation home to just 3.7million people on Russia’s southern border matter?
Ivanishvili, a ‘freakishly calm’ man who ‘exudes an extraordinary self-confidence’, had to assure allies on his return that he was no Moscow agent.
‘He told me as soon as he saw Putin on TV, and his manner of walking, he decided this guy would not let him operate with any freedom – so he packed his bags and moved to Georgia,’ says Ghia Khukhashvili, his former advisor.
For his first decade back home, Ivanishvili – returning with a fortune worth one fifth of Georgia’s GDP – stayed out of politics. He remained a semi-mythical figure, building a ‘James Bond villain lair’ overlooking the capital, Tbilisi, from which he showered artists, intellectuals and the church with money.
Notoriously reclusive, he stayed in the glass mansion where he keeps pet dolphins, sharks, penguins and flamingos.
But then, in 2011, the Messiah came down from the hilltop and created a new political party – Georgian Dream.
Ivanishvili offered hope to the splintered opposition and achieved the impossible by uniting them to defeat the increasingly autocratic ruling government the following year.
He promised his backers he would remove the previous administration before resigning from politics.
But, having kept his word to step down as Prime Minister after one year, it quickly became clear that the Boa Constrictor had no intention of relinquishing his grip on power.
‘He was going out of politics, then suddenly he decided that he is the boss,’ says Giorgi Margvelashvili, who served as a minister under Ivanishvili but, on becoming President in 2014, cut ties when the billionaire had started undermining his authority.
A senior US diplomat in Georgia also noticed early warning signs, remarking how he once asked a stunned American delegation ‘what do I really have to do’ to get into NATO by 2016 – having been unpersuaded by their suggestions of democratic reforms.
Ivanishvili gives a speech to the public during the campaign event on September 14, 2024 in Gori, Georgia
‘He couldn’t get his head around why things like human rights and rule of law were necessary,’ they said.
The diplomat also noted how he ‘hates being lectured – especially from women’.
Though not holding public office since 2013, Ivanishvili has maintained control over Georgia by placing close associates in charge of key institutions.
His personal bodyguard became Minister of Internal Affairs, his wife’s doctor became Health Minister, and three out of the past four Prime Ministers were employed in his companies.
‘The Prime Minister of Georgia serves at the pleasure of Bidzina,’ Lincoln Mitchell, once an informal advisor to Ivanishvili from the US, says.
‘Access to Bidzina is the most valuable political asset in the Georgian government.’
True to his Bond villain image, Ivanishvili would bend ministers to his will with a summons to his business centre – where he keeps a tank full of sharks to ‘underline his attitude to business’.
‘Bidzina is devoid of emotions,’ Georgian political guru Mr Khukhashvili says. ‘Once he is dissatisfied with someone, he sits them down in the business centre and explains to them what they did wrong.
He will repeat it 100 times to grind this guy down until there is a final, total moral destruction of him.
An important aspect is that others are watching this. It does not matter at what point you admit your guilt, what matters is when Bidzina thinks that you are fully and utterly destroyed psychologically. Then he releases you.’
For Mr Khukhashvili, while Ivanishvili keeps many exotic pets, they are just for show; it is his love of trees that is more important to understand him.
The eccentric has made headlines for uprooting trees he likes and transporting them thousands of miles to his mansion where he plants them in his own ‘Garden of Eden’.
Ivanishvili stands behind the bulletproof glass and gives speech to the public during the campaign event on September 14
‘He loves trees because trees cannot talk back,’ Mr Khukhashvili says.
‘Animals have a free will, and they might not be willing to entertain Bidzina’s desires – he is not a fan of that.
‘The same Garden of Eden approach is prevalent in his politics as well. Those he has psychologically evaporated, he has turned them into a tree to plant. He plants the Prime Ministers and high government officials just like trees.’
For 10 years Ivanishvili quietly uprooted Georgia to his own ends, sending the country tumbling down rankings for transparency and democracy as he co-opted the state, the courts and the banks.
While increasing trade to Russia, however, Georgian Dream also maintained its commitment to the EU and NATO, even writing the desire to join the alliances in the country’s constitution.
This was vital to hold power in the fiercely anti-Russia country. It was only when Putin invaded Ukraine, though, that Ivanishvili was forced to reveal his hand.
‘Now the chess board is visible,’ says Mr Khukhashvili, the wily advisor who paved Ivanishvili’s rise to power before they fell out and cut ties.
‘He made a calculation that the war would be over in one month, Russia would fully absorb and occupy Ukraine and start building some sort of modernised Soviet Union, and that the next target would be Georgia.
He was frightened to death because as he himself is a God in Georgia, there’s an entire pantheon of Gods in which Putin qualifies as Zeus. So, he started preparing for that eventuality.’
Within 48 hours of Putin’s invasion, Georgian Dream began pumping out pro-Russian propaganda – and has refused to sanction the Kremlin.
While Ukraine did not fall, the West has not backed Kyiv sufficiently and Ivanishvili still bets on Putin.
His party introduced a raft of draconian legislation including the ‘foreign agents’ law that will crush dissent, homophobic anti-LGBT diktats designed to torpedo liberal Western aspirations, and an offshore bill that could see Ivanishvili become the ‘Kremlin’s cashier’.
The latter allows offshore assets to be transferred to Georgia tax free where the shadow ruler’s tame judges could, theoretically, protect them from sanctions.
Within 48 hours of Putin’s invasion, Georgian Dream began pumping out pro-Russian propaganda – and has refused to sanction the Kremlin
This while Georgians shed the most blood of any nation as volunteers fighting beside their Ukrainian comrades with whom they have a shared historical brotherhood resisting Russia.
How could a people so fiercely pro-Western accept this shift? Mr Margvelashvili says it is thanks to a model of government that began almost from the moment Ivanishvili took power, and which has gradually spread apathy amongst the people.
‘It is a classic Russian format of governance,’ says Mr Margvelashvili, who this summer joined the For Georgia opposition party.
‘The whole concept is that everything is rotten, everything is worthless – it is some kind of fatalism. He undermines state institutions completely, going gradually through and discrediting every layer of government.
‘Not only government, not only independent players like the president’s office, or NGOs, or the media, he was discrediting his own government.
‘You discredit everywhere and then you tell the society – why do you care about the change? Everyone is worthless.’
All this to reach one goal – Georgia, once a darling of the West, to fall back under Moscow’s boot.
That, in short, is what’s at stake come October 26. A Georgian Dream win would represent perhaps Putin’s greatest victory and, Ivanishvili hopes, please him enough to help preserve the oligarch’s rule.
Ivanishvili is pictured with his wife and son in an archive picture
Were Georgia, the nation which resisted Russia before Ukraine, to now become another Belarus it would send a clear message to Kyiv that they cannot escape such a fate.
This would amount to a devastating geopolitical U-turn, send a chill across the post-Soviet sphere and usher in a new iron curtain that closes Europe’s gateway to the East.
‘Georgia is part of a bigger story for Russia’s propaganda,’ Mr Margvelashvili says.
‘The West doesn’t understand what Georgia is – Russia is speaking for the countries that were part of the Soviet Union. For all of them the message is very clear. Putin is saying to Ukraine sure, fight us. You die, we die – but in the end you will be like Georgia.’
There is, however, one factor the scheming oligarch apparently did not anticipate – Gen Z.
Far from the apathy he expected after years of rot, hundreds of thousands of young people took to the streets to protest his plan.
The crowds were the largest the country has ever seen – bigger even than those that sparked the Rose Revolution.
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Ivanishvili was forced to deploy ‘domestic terror’ against his own people to push through the ‘foreign agents’ law in May, almost certainly stifling any hopes of winning a free and fair election.
All this left the Boa Constrictor in a bind. Unable to win fairly, rigging the elections could spark a revolution.
In such a scenario, an intervention from Moscow is unlikely. Both parties would be unwilling to invite Russian troops to uphold order as it would harden Western resolve in Ukraine and unite Georgians.
That is if they could even spare the troops, which is unlikely given their struggles with Kyiv.
Crucially, the use of violence to betray the people’s will prompted the EU and the US to threaten the ruling party with sanctions.
A European travel ban would be particularly devastating to Ivanishvili and his four jet-setting children, and signal to his Georgian Dream minions that their Messiah might be human. (He promised them the West would not follow through).
Most importantly, restricting the movements and money of these politicians would signal to the people, so disheartened after the first failure of mass protests in Georgia’s modern history, that their voices had been heard.
But over the past five months, Europe has allowed Ivanishvili to wriggle free. America has largely pulled its punches too, however at least Washington hit a few dozen Georgian Dream members with travel bans and has reportedly debanked Ivanishvili’s family.
Across the country Georgian Dream election billboards have been erected with pictures of Ukrainian cities destroyed by Russian bombs under the simple caption: ‘Choose peace’
In Brussels, nothing of any note has materialised. Despite the rhetoric, no European country has even imposed a travel ban.
Indeed, as Georgians basked in their football team’s legendary run to the last 16 in the Euro’s this summer – the first time they have made the finals – they were also forced to watch Georgian Dream Prime Minister Irakli Khobakidze and other Ivanishvili minions soak up the matches pitch side in Germany.
This all sent a clear signal to the Georgian people that the West does not care for them – a theme which Ivanishvili has ruthlessly exploited.
Across the country Georgian Dream election billboards have been erected with pictures of Ukrainian cities destroyed by Russian bombs under the simple caption: ‘Choose peace’.
The unspoken message being Moscow is close, the West is far, so keep quiet and accept your fate.
As Georgians head to the polls, they are in need of more than warm words from Brussels.
Europe must make good on their promises now – and not after the country has already become Belarus 2.0. Ivanishvili has bet the protesters will become apathetic.
For Georgia, Ukraine and the West, it must be hoped that Ivanishvili has miscalculated and that, unlike his beloved trees, the Georgian people will not entertain the recluse’s desires.