# Bidzina Ivanishvili **Bidzina Ivanishvili** (born 18 February 1956, Chorvila, Georgian SSR) is the billionaire who founded [[Georgian Dream]] and whom the U.S. Treasury treats as the power behind it — the man who runs [[Georgia (country)]]'s ruling party without holding elected office. He served as prime minister for only thirteen months, from October 2012 to November 2013. His formal title since 30 December 2023 is the party's "honorary chairman" — a post the party charter empowers to nominate the prime minister. He is the clearest case in the vault of a post-Soviet oligarch whose fortune was made in Russia and whose political project, without any formal tie to the Kremlin, delivered outcomes the Kremlin wanted. See [[Post-Soviet States]]. ## The fortune Ivanishvili's money was made in Russia in the late Soviet and early post-Soviet years: computer sales from 1987, then the banks Rossiysky Kredit and Impexbank, then metals, including a stake in the Lebedinsky mining combine from 1995. He sold Rossiysky Kredit for $352 million and a pharmacy chain for $60 million in 2011, the year before he entered Georgian politics. He renounced Russian citizenship in 2011 and has held French citizenship since 2010; Georgia stripped and then restored his Georgian citizenship around the 2012 election. Forbes cut its estimate of his worth to $2.7 billion in April 2025, down from $4.7–4.9 billion. A large part of the fortune sat with Credit Suisse, where banker Patrice Lescaudron (convicted in Geneva in 2018) moved money out of Ivanishvili's accounts to cover losses elsewhere. Ivanishvili won about $607 million in Bermuda, upheld by the Privy Council in November 2025, and a reduced $742.7 million award in Singapore in 2023 — money that U.S. sanctions now block from being paid without Treasury approval. ## The sanctions | Date | Measure | |---|---| | 1–2 December 2024 | Entry bans by [[Lithuania]], [[Latvia]] and [[Estonia]] | | 5 December 2024 | [[Ukraine]] sanctions him and 18 associates | | 27 December 2024 | U.S. Treasury designates him under Executive Order 14024, the Russia-related sanctions authority — "for undermining the democratic and Euro-Atlantic future of Georgia for the benefit of the Russian Federation" | | 24 February 2026 | The UK sanctions the pro-government channels Imedi and POSTV for Russian disinformation — not Ivanishvili personally | There are no EU-wide sanctions on him. The European Parliament called for an asset freeze in June 2026 *[single-sourced]*. After the U.S. designation, OCCRP reported that he began moving companies out of Panama-registered holding structures into a Georgian company *[single-sourced]*. ## The "Global War Party" His signature rhetorical move, first used in his own voice at the pro-foreign-agents-law rally of 29 April 2024, is the claim that a "Global War Party" with "considerable influence on the European and U.S. bureaucracy" is trying to drag Georgia into war with Russia. It recasts the West, rather than Moscow, as the threat to Georgian sovereignty — and recasts every Western criticism of Georgian Dream as part of the plot. The phrase had circulated among party officials since January 2023. ## Why it matters here Ivanishvili is the reason the vault's answer to "did Georgia undergo a Putin takeover?" is *no, and it didn't need one*. Nothing in the record shows Kremlin direction. What the record shows is a billionaire with a Russian-made fortune, a party that answers to him, and a sequence of laws and decisions — foreign-agent registration, the EU freeze, the opposition-ban lawsuit — that converge on Moscow's preferred outcome. The U.S. sanctions authority chosen for him, the Russia-related EO 14024, is the government's own statement of what it thinks that convergence means. ## See Also - [[Georgian Dream]] - [[Georgia (country)]] - [[Irakli Kobakhidze]] — prime minister and party chair - [[Mikheil Kavelashvili]] — president - [[Post-Soviet States]] - [[Viktor Orbán]] — the other European case of a governing party built around one man's long control