Badri Patarkatsishvili was said to be Georgia’s wealthiest businessman, having made billions in the Russia in the 1990s, in deals as labyrinthine as they were lucrative. Most recently he was better known as a leader of the opposition in Georgia, where his TV station, Imedi-TV, was repeatedly attacked by the Saakashvili Government for its opposition leanings and where he mounted an unsuccessful campaign in last month’s presidential elections.
Arkady Shalovich Patarkatsishvili, was born in 1955, to a family of the Jewish Georgian intelligentsia in Tbilisi, then capital of the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic. Like many who achieved success, and notoriety, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Patarkatsishvili, although by all accounts an unremarkable student at school and university, was very active in the Soviet Union’s youth organisation - the Komsomol. Anti-Semitism was as pervasive in the Soviet system as it is in Russia today, and his Jewish descent was often held against him, but in the Komsomol he made friends who were to become valuable contacts as he forged his post-Soviet career.
After his graduation from the Georgian Polytechnical Institute he took a position at the “Soviet Georgia” textile factory, rising to the position of deputy director. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, he took over the country’s Maudi company. He also set up his own engineering business, but it was his early involvement in the automobile trade in Georgia that brought him into contact with the full spectrum of the region’s financial interests.
Boris Berezovsky, the Russian billionaire now living in political exile in the UK, was in the 1990s a used-car salesman, but he was already well on his way to making a name for himself as one of the most significant players in the post-Soviet financial sphere. In Patarkatsishvili, Berezovsky no doubt saw a successful manager with crucial connections. Without those connections, amid the legal and economic chaos that followed the collapse of the Soviet regime, business was all but impossible. Law was only sporadically enforced. Business disputes often turned violent, and some who were involved then can now reel off lists of names of those who died in the unofficial war for the assets of Russia’s key industries, businesses and natural resources.
Patarkatsishvili was known as one of Berezovsky’s most loyal business colleagues in the 1990s, and was referred to as his “spetsnaz” and righthand man. He began as the regional director for the Caucasus of Berezovsky’s Logovaz concern. He soon rose to become its deputy general director, and it was then, seeking a larger stage, that he moved to Russia in 1993.
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He quickly developed a broad business portfolio, becoming in 1995 the first deputy general director of the ORT TV station. That year he also took the position of chairman of the board of directors of ORT’s advertising wing, before branching out into finance when he accepted an invitation to chair the board of directors with AKB United Bank.
Given the, quite often literally, cut-throat nature of business in Russia in these years, it should not come as a surprise that he was detained on suspicion of involvement with the murder of ORT TV’s general director, Vladislav Listyev, in March 1995.
By 1997 he also had an interest in arguably Russia’s greatest asset, its oil. He was selected to oversee the competition for the sale of shares in the state oil company, Sibneft. These auctions are now generally alleged to have been fixed, with front companies widely understood among participants to represent particular interests, and individuals, allowed to purchase the majority of shares.
Following his time with ORT TV, Patarkatsishvili allied himself with TV-6, a station that became home to many of Russia’s most biting satirists, and was famous for its longstanding non-Kremlin line. However, the media in Russia that was not allied to the Kremlin often furthered the interests of financiers, oligarchs like Berezovsky, and much of its visceral critique of the Russian authorities was permitted simply because the powerful financiers of the station saw in that a measure of revenge against a Kremlin that was increasingly intent on reasserting its economic, as well as political authority.
For the most part Patarkatsishvili took little interest in politics in this early part of his career - although in 2000 he did serve as adviser to the Georgian President, Edvard Shevardnadze. This political interest was in part the result of his frustrated ambition, as scandals relating to his early business dealings forced his retreat from Moscow.
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One significant such scandal was his involvement in 2001 in an attempt to spring Nikolai Glushkov, the former deputy director of Aeroflot and a friend of Berezovsky, from custody. This was in collaboration with Andrei Lugovoy, then the head of security for ORT and now wanted in connection with the murder in London in 2006 of Alexander Litvinenko (obituary, November 25, 2006) .
At the same time, the business and the political climates had begun to change dramatically. Putin brought to power a new elite who, quite literally, knew where the bodies were buried, and soon close ties with the new powers were needed to ensure continuing involvement in most important enterprises. Patarkatsishvili’s star was no longer in the ascendant in Moscow.
He returned to Georgia, throwing himself into the turbulent political world of the Rose Revolution and its aftermath. Although he continued his involvement in Russian media until 2006, when he sold his interest in Kommersant to another oligarch, Alisher Usmanov, it was his ownership of the Georgian broadcasting company Imedi that grabbed the headlines in recent years. He sold a controlling stake in the station to News Corp, parent company of The Times, in October last year.
Although Patarkatsishvili had initially supported the administration of President Saakashvili, he became disillusioned, notably after the mysterious death of the Prime Minister, Zurab Zhvania (obituary, February 4, 2005) . He became involved in opposition politics, and it was after a rally in November last year that the Georgian government declared a state of emergency, shut down Imedi and accused Patarkatsishvili of plotting a coup. The station was later allowed to reopen.
Patarkatsishvili went into exile in Britain and Israel. In December it was claimed in The Sunday Times that a Georgian government official had been plotting to kill Patarkatsishvili. Despite this, he launched a chaotic campaign in the snap presidential elections called by Saakashvili. Unable to return to Georgia, and pulling out and then re-entering the race days before the vote, he scored only 7 per cent.
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Despite this failure, Patarkatsishvili was a household name in Georgia. People knew him for his eccentric appearance, with his moustache a flamboyant blaze of white on his upper lip - and for his excesses. While he was in Moscow rumours spread that, for example, he bought his wife the whole floor of an apartment block in the heart of the city. He also owned a large estate in Georgia, as well as the Dinamo Tblisi football team, and a multimillion-pound mansion in Leatherhead, Surrey, where he died.
Badri Patarkatsishvili, Georgian businessman, was born on October 31, 1955. He was found dead on February 13, 2008, aged 52