Former Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili, who has been imprisoned since 2021, was sentenced on Wednesday to nine more years in jail after being found guilty of embezzlement.
Saakashvili, in office from 2004 to 2013, had been convicted of embezzling 9 million Georgian lari ($3.3 million) via expenses claims for what prosecutors called “luxury” spending.
In a post on X after the sentencing, Saakashvili, who denies the charges and says the expenses were legitimate, called the verdict an “outrageous case of political persecution”.
Saakashvili was already serving a six-year sentence for abuse of power, having been jailed after returning to Georgia in 2021. He has spent much of that time in a prison hospital.
The sentences will run concurrently, so Wednesday’s ruling will keep him in jail until 2030. He is also on trial for entering Georgia illegally in 2021, and separately for a crackdown on protesters in 2007.
Georgian television showed a commotion in court after the verdict was announced, with Saakashvili’s supporters calling the judge a “slave” of the government.
Now a deeply polarising figure, Saakashvili rose to power on a tide of acclaim in the 2003 Rose Revolution.
He reorientated Georgia towards the West and introduced public sector reforms that delivered rapid improvements in governance and the economy of the South Caucasus country of 3.7 million.
However, the latter part of his tenure was marked by authoritarianism, police brutality, and a disastrous 2008 war with Russia.
In 2012, his United National Movement lost an election to a coalition headed by Bidzina Ivanishvili, a billionaire businessman who is still Georgia’s de facto leader.
After leaving office, Saakashvili moved to Ukraine, where he briefly served as governor of the Odesa region.
He returned in 2021, despite having been convicted in absentia of abuse of power, and was jailed on arrival.
The ruling Georgian Dream party regularly accuses all opposition parties, including those critical of Saakashvili, of having links to him.
In recent years, Georgian Dream has clamped down on opposition and steered the former Soviet republic closer to Moscow again.
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Source: Reuters
