"I advise Garibashvili to begin a political struggle. He is a political prisoner of Kobakhidze and Mdinaradze," Inashvili said on Wednesday, offering the platform of an alliance she puts at about 50 organizations.
The letters keep coming. On Tuesday Garibashvili wrote that he would stop attending the proceedings, calling the case "a relentless political struggle, injustice and evil against me." A week earlier his third letter had spoken of 8 months of silence and of pressure reaching his 65-year-old father. In another he described an offer he says reached him, a guaranteed 5-year term for admitting guilt and leaving politics; he now says the relayed letter came from Mdinaradze, after first attributing it to Bidzina Ivanishvili and withdrawing that.
“He is a political prisoner of Kobakhidze and Mdinaradze”
Georgian Dream's answer has been dismissal: "an attempt to stage an epistolary masquerade," the chair of parliament's legal committee Archil Gorduladze told Sputnik Georgia on Monday. The courtship is public now.
The new charge, announced last Monday, carries 11 to 15 years: 750,000 lari, about $290,000, allegedly taken through closed defense procurements in 2022 to 2024, with former defense minister Juansher Burchuladze cooperating. Those are the years Garibashvili was prime minister and Burchuladze his minister, and prosecutors put the damage in the wider file at about $2.7 million. The next fixed date in his calendar is the court's: a preliminary hearing on October 19.