On Friday, “The third president of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili, was arrested and imprisoned,” Georgian Prime Minister Irakli Garibashvili said at a press conference.
On Friday morning the former president announced that he is in his home country. “Hello, Georgia! I’m already in Georgia after eight years. I’ve risked my life and freedom,” he said in a video posted on his Facebook account. He also revealed that he is located in the coastal city of Batumi.
Initially, the Ministry of the Interior in Tbilisi did not confirm this information. Georgian authorities have announced that if the politician did in fact return to the country, he would be detained.
Saakashvili currently serves as a civil servant in Ukraine. In 2013, he left Georgia, because his party had lost the parliamentary elections a year earlier, with the Georgian Dream party, created by the influential businessman and billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili, whom the opposition accused of having ties with Russia.
In 2012, the new rulers decided to initiate several criminal cases against the former president. In 2018, Saakashvili, who was in exile, was sentenced in absentia to six years in prison for abuse of power. Since 2014, he has been wanted by a Georgian arrest warrant.
Saakashvili dismisses all the accusations and says they are politically motivated. The politician was deprived of Georgian citizenship when he took up Ukrainian citizenship.
A political crisis has been present in Georgia since the last parliamentary elections, in which the Georgian Dream party won for the third consecutive time. The election results were met with boycotts by the opposition and accusations of abuse.
Since then, the political crisis in Georgia has continued and attempts to resolve it has failed. After many months of boycotting the new parliament, the party in power and part of the opposition signed a “settlement” in April mediated by the President of the European Council, Charles Michel.
Source: ( POLAND IN)
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