Georgia could have had a fully developed air defense system from France by 2021, but the ruling Georgian Dream (GD) party and its patron Bidzina Ivanishvili broke the deal, former Defense Minister Irakli Alasania told RFE/RL’s Georgian Service in a recent interview.
In his interview with Radio Liberty, he explains the circumstances surrounding the arrest of Defense Ministry employees in 2014, which ultimately led to his dismissal.
Alasania claims that negotiations began with the then French Defense Minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, about a year before the “Cables Case” began. The goal of the negotiations was for France to sell Georgia an air defense system, in exchange for Georgia’s participation in a peacekeeping mission in the Central African Republic. Alasania claims that France agreed for Georgia to use credit and start paying for the defense system after 7 years.
Alasania says the negotiations lasted about a year, and eventually, with the consent of all relevant state institutions in both countries, an agreement was reached. However, one day before the memorandum was to be signed, the then Prime Minister, Irakli Garibashvili, called him and demanded that the agreement be canceled.
“Naturally, it was implied that Ivanishvili requested this,” Alasania says, claiming that he refused to accept Garibashvili’s request. The next day, before the agreement was signed, five senior Defense Ministry officials were arrested, Alasania says, in an attempt to pressure him.
Irakli Alasania signed the memorandum anyway. However, he was forced to resign soon after.
He says that the memorandum is still in effect and that Georgia can resume negotiations on this issue.
The former Minister of Defense says the violation of this agreement was an unforgivable mistake “that the government of the time made.”
On October 28, 2024, one former and four acting officials of the Ministry of Defense were arrested and charged with misspending GEL 4.1 million in an alleged sham tender in 2013 for the laying of fiber optic cable in 2014. They denied the charges. In 2016, the Tbilisi City Court sentenced them to seven years in prison for the alleged embezzlement. In January 2017, the Tbilisi Court of Appeal reclassified their charges as abuse of office. The new charge reduced their sentence from seven years to one year and six months in prison, but they were not allowed to defend themselves against the revised charges. In February 2017, they appealed to the Supreme Court, which refused to grant them leave to appeal. Then-President Giorgi Margvelashvili pardoned them and they were released in 2017. Despite their release, they took their case to the ECHR.
On February 12, the European Court of Human Rights found a violation of Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights – the right to a fair trial – in the so-called Cables Case. Specifically, the Court found that the applicants’ right to be informed in detail about the nature and grounds of their accusation and to have adequate time and appropriate conditions to exercise their right to a defense had been violated.
