MADRID, 2 Oct. (EUROPA PRESS) –
The lawyer of the former president of Georgia Mikhail Saakashvili, who was arrested the day before his arrival in the country, does not anticipate that his client will be extradited to Ukraine, before rejecting all the charges brought against the former president.
“I cannot even imagine such a procedure,” said lawyer Beka Basilaia, who has assured that all the charges against his client are the result of an invention, according to statements collected by the official Sputnik news agency.
The Prime Minister of Georgia, Irakli Garibashvili, announced on Friday the arrest of Saakashvili after he returned on the same day to the country he presided over, a day before the holding of local elections and after eight years abroad after his flight in the middle of accusations against him for embezzlement and the representation of a protest when he was President.
After the arrest, the country’s president, Salome Zurabishvili, has given a televised speech in which she has assured that she will “never” grant the ex-president a pardon. In addition, he has taken the opportunity to thank the security forces for their work during the operation, which has had “a high professional level” and has been carried out “in a peaceful manner.”
According to Zurabishvili, former President Saakashvili made an “unacceptable decision when he resigned the people”, so this Friday, when he “invaded the territory in violation of the state border and the law, trying to undermine the authority of the Police”, has been arrested. “And most clearly, with the intention of” destabilizing the country, “the president then criticized, citing the” advice and warnings “that the former president had received in this regard.
This same Saturday, the president of the Georgian Parliament, Kaja Kuchava, has assured that the arrest of Saakashvili will not affect relations between Tbilisi and Kiev. “Nothing will be able to weigh down the Georgian-Ukrainian fraternal relations (…) The arrest of the leader of the National Movement represents a good example that provocations have no place in Georgia,” according to Kuchava at a press conference.
The arrival of the former president has caused a stir in the Georgian political scene, with the leader of the ruling Georgian Dream party, Irakli Kobajidze, assuring that the former president had not entered the national territory and that he was a “clown.”
For her part, MEP Marketa Gregorova, a member of an electoral observation mission of the European Parliament, already warned last week that the return of Saakashvili could complicate and destabilize the holding of the elections.
Saakashvili, who during his tenures imposed several reforms to bring closer ties with the West and starred in a brief conflict with Russia in 2008 – which led to the loss of the South Ossetia and Abkhazia regions – has an arrest warrant pending for embezzlement and repression, for which the authorities have warned on several occasions that the former president will be arrested as soon as he enters the country.
Following his departure from the Presidency, he left Georgia. In 2015, the then president of Ukraine, Petro Poroshenko, granted him Ukrainian nationality and appointed him governor of the Odessa region, a position from which he would end up resigning a year and a half later due to disagreements with Poroshenko.
Subsequently, Poroshenko issued a decree in 2017 to withdraw citizenship from Saakashvili, who, after spending time abroad, returned on foot from Poland supported by a group of supporters. After leading a series of protests, he was arrested again in 2018 and expelled from Ukraine.
However, with the coming to power of the Ukrainian President, Volodimir Zelenski, the former Georgian president has regained his status, as well as his citizenship, and was appointed by the president as chairman of the National Reform Committee of the Ukrainian Government.
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