A Georgian court has extended former President Mikheil Saakashvili prison sentence by nine years after finding him guilty of embezzling public funds, the Georgian prosecutor said Wednesday.
The Tbilisi City Court found Saakashvili, who led Georgia from 2004 to 2012, guilty of misappropriating 9 million lari ($3.24 million) from the state budget during his second term for “personal luxuries.”
Saakashvili has been serving a six-year sentence since October 2021, when he returned to Georgia and was immediately arrested. The new verdict extends his imprisonment by nine years.
The court ruled that Saakashvili issued secret decrees directing the Special State Protection Service to cover costs that the presidential administration and State Security could not legally finance, creating a legal cover for the embezzled funds.
Teimuraz Janashia, the former head of the Special State Protection Service, was also charged in the case and fined 300,000 lari ($108,155). However, the judge said there was no evidence that Janashia had personally spent the allegedly misappropriated funds.
Both Saakashvili and Janashia pleaded not guilty.
Saakashvili was previously sentenced twice in absentia in 2018 for abuse of power. He received a three-year sentence for pardoning former Interior Ministry officials convicted of murdering Sandro Girgvliani, a senior bank employee found dead near Tbilisi. He also received a six-year sentence for allegedly ordering an attack on opposition lawmaker Valeri Gelashvili in 2005.
After leaving office, Saakashvili moved to Ukraine, where he briefly served as governor of the Odessa Black Sea region from 2015 to 2016. He was granted Ukrainian citizenship by President Petro Poroshenko in 2015 in exchange for supporting the Ukrainian revolution. Poroshenko revoked his citizenship in 2017.
Saakashvili could face additional prison time as he is currently facing two other charges. One relates to the dispersal of anti-government protests and the seizure of assets belonging to late billionaire and opposition figure Badri Patarkatsishvili in 2007. The other involves illegal border crossing.
Saakashvili denounced his 2021 arrest as "politically motivated," claiming that Georgian billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili's ally, then-Prime Minister Irakli Garibashvili, threatened to extend his sentence if he did not “stop his political activity.”
“The sentence against me is an outrageous case of Political Persecution from a Russian oligarch to whom I peacefully handed power in 2012,” Saakashvili wrote on Facebook, calling on the international community to speak out “against all the injustices taking place in Georgia that includes multiple cases of political imprisonment and a crackdown on peaceful rallies and opposition media.”