Dear Mr. Ivanishvili,
If I am writing to you today, it is not because I expect you to change any of your policies; I am writing because I feel the moral obligation to tell you all the things that your boot licking advisors and entourage never had the honesty to tell you.
During your ten years in power, you brought corruption and nepotism, chauvinism and protectionism, criminality and political persecution; you divided the Georgian society like never before, and built hatred and divide between members of the same families, between close neighbors, between fellow students, and between best friends at an unprecedented level in modern history of Georgia.
You hijacked the judiciary by nominating judges who follow blindly your instructions, jailing or persecuting your political opponents, and serving your personal interests and the interests of your cronies and supporters; You have highjacked the courts thinking that this will allow you to remain in power forever.
Well, don’t rejoice for controlling the judiciary, and remember that those judges with no ethics, no morality and no principles, who distort and rape justice to serve your interests today, are the same judges who will show you no loyalty and no mercy, and who will convict you and your associates and send you all to jail as soon as the government will change hands; we have previously seen what such kind of judges did when their former presidents Shevardnadze and Saakashvili lost power, and we will see it again when you will lose power yourself.
Your supporters claim that your charity in Georgia over the years is estimated at 3 billion Dollars, but no one mentions the damages that you have caused to the Georgian economy with your policies, and that are assessed to exceed 15 billion USD, would the economy in Dollar value had only grown by an average of 7% a year for the period between 2013 and 2020, instead of stagnating at the same level. For the record, under Saakashvili, the economy grew by four folds in 9 years, going from 4 billion Dollars in 2003 to 16 billion Dollars in 2012.
Your personally appointed Prime Minister, claims that thanks to your government’s “wise economic policies” we will have 10% economic growth in 2022. Well, I am sorry to disappoint you and disappoint the Prime Minister, this growth is not the result of your “wise economic policies” that remain unchanged since you came to power in 2012, but rather the result of the war in Ukraine and of all the Russians who transferred substantial funds to Georgia since February 2022, and who started their businesses in the country to escape international sanctions.
For comparison purposes, Armenia’s economy and despite their war with Azerbaijan this year, will grow by 13% till the end of 2022, thanks to the influx of Russian funds and to Russian business people, as clearly announced by the National Bank of Armenia.
None of your government policies were ever implemented to move Georgia forward, but all of your policies are solely chosen, written and implemented to keep you in power as long as possible.
You have hired tens of thousands of useless bureaucrats, most of them related to your party members, and who probably do nothing all day long but playing “Solitaire” on their computers.
You regularly subsidize agriculture, encouraging farmers to continue producing non profitable crops.
You create various sterile social programs by contracting huge loans; all those policies are undermining the economy and burdening the future generations, but you simply don’t care as long as their beneficiaries are voting for your party during the elections.
During your 10 years in power, hundreds of thousands of Georgians have emigrated to other countries. People don’t only emigrate because of economic hardship; people emigrate when they distrust their governments and when they lose hope in the future of their countries.
What is worrying though, is not only that the younger generation or the poorer portion of the population emigrates, but that highly educated and well-paid experienced executives are leaving Georgia for jobs abroad, because they don’t believe in the future of their country anymore.
Under your administration, the most flourishing business has unfortunately become selling suitcases.
You have created a satellite political body to your Georgian Dream, called “People’s Power”, who repeats daily anti-western slogans, insulting Georgia’s western friends and partners and more particularly the US Ambassador to Georgia, Miss Degnan.
You are purposefully destroying Georgia’s traditional relations with the West, by poisoning people’s minds everyday with lies and manipulated statements, released by the members of People’s Power and by the leadership of your own party, the Georgian Dream.
You are very simply attempting to shift the Georgian public opinion from being pro-Western to becoming pro-Russian, hoping that in a year or two, you will be able to claim that your “democratic government” will follow the choice of the majority, and since the majority doesn’t want the West anymore, Georgia will align with Russia.
You have a created a one in a time case in history, as your government has befriended the occupying enemy and unfriends its allies.
This is your choice, and you might well be held accountable one day by the Georgian people; but what you also must surely understand, is that your parliamentary majority that was elected in 2020 on a completely pro-European program as presented then by the chair of your party, has become totally illegitimate today, since it is implementing the opposite policies than those that your constituents have elected you for.
In short, your ten years have been exclusively based on lies and deceit. You have lied without end to your own voters, to the Georgian people, and to the international community at large.
You lied to everyone regarding Anaklia Port, claiming that you were supporting this project, but in reality, you destroyed it totally, using various state bodies under you direct control.
You lied to everyone regarding your intention to see Georgia joining the EU and NATO, you did and you are still doing everything in your power to shift the public opinion from being pro-Western into becoming pro-Russian.
In the fall of 2018, between the two rounds of the Presidential elections, you have begged on television the people of Georgia to vote for your candidate; you lied to them asking them to give you one year to fully reverse the situation, and again you did absolutely nothing.
You lied to the Georgian people in June 2019 after the “Gavrilov Night”, promising them fully proportional elections for 2020, but later on you retracted your promise again.
You lied to the Georgian people and to the international community by signing the “Charles Michel Agreement” in April 2021, and you withdrew from it only three months later.
For 10 years you lied to foreign investors and business people, promising them great opportunities, but at the same time, you had them harassed by various state bodies who deprived many of them from their residency permits, from their investments, racketeered them, attacked them and left many others defrauded by the courts and totally unprotected by the law.
And now your personally appointed Prime Minister, is inviting foreign investors to build several major hydropower stations in Georgia for billions of Dollars, at a time you had systematically refused previously to protect the rights of other foreign investors, who trusted you and signed with your government agreements worth multi-billion Dollars for hydropower stations, leaving them with losses amounting to tens of millions of Dollars.
After 10 years of lies and deceit, and besides your supporters, cheerleaders and other people who benefit from your corrupt deals and from your “generosity”, no one believes you or believes your government anymore, and this includes both Georgian and international communities alike.
You have totally lost your credibility, and all that remains for you now, is to continue your rush ahead in thick fog.
Sincerely,
Fady Asly
November 3, 2022
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