Georgian Court Sentences Mikheil Saakashvili in Absentia to 3 Years in Prison

KIEV, Ukraine — A Georgian court on Friday sentenced former President Mikheil Saakashvili to three years in prison for abusing his pardon powers while serving as president. Mr. Saakashvili, who is now in Ukraine, was sentenced in absentia.
Mr. Saakashvili’s legal woes have been piling up in both his adopted country, Ukraine, and his homeland, Georgia, but the ruling is the first time he has been sentenced to prison.
In a Facebook post on Friday, he called the ruling, and the flurry of cases against him more broadly, a response to his efforts to fight corruption and “oligarchs” in both countries.
A gregarious populist and an avowed enemy of Russian influence in former Soviet states, Mr. Saakashvili has cast himself as a fighter for good government and pluralistic democracy, and he has said that the criminal cases against him are pushback from an entrenched, corrupt elite. Detractors call him a showboating has-been.
Georgian authorities accuse him of abusing his power, and Ukraine has stripped him of his citizenship for making false statements on a form.

After stepping down as president in 2013, and a brief retirement in Brooklyn, Mr. Saakashvili supported the Ukrainian revolution the following year. Petro O. Poroshenko, who became Ukraine’s president after the ouster of Viktor F. Yanukovych, rewarded him with citizenship and a position as regional governor in Odessa.
That relationship soured, though, after Mr. Saakashvili accused Ukrainian cabinet ministers and Mr. Poroshenko of corruption. While the Georgian government has sought his extradition for years, his troubles in Ukraine make that prospect more likely.

In the Georgian court on Friday, Mr. Saakashvili was convicted of pardoning four police officers in 2008 without going through the presidential commission on pardons, Civil.ge, a Georgian news portal, reported.
The pardons, prosecutors contended, were part of a scheme to cover up evidence in the investigation of the murder of a Georgian banker, Sandro Girgvliani.
In his statement, Mr. Saakashvili called the ruling ridiculous and orchestrated by a political enemy, Bidzina Ivanishvili, a billionaire and a former prime minister who has had business interests in Russia. Now, Mr. Saakashvili wrote, Mr. Ivanishvili and President Poroshenko are coordinating the legal actions against him in Ukraine and Georgia.
“To judge a president for using his right to pardon, which I applied to 133 former military service personnel and which is not limited in any way, testifies to the completely political character of this process,” he wrote. “This ‘decision,’ as well as the parallel legal process in Kiev, clearly demonstrates that the oligarchic governments in both Ukraine and Georgia are working — in a synchronized and completely coordinated fashion with each other — against me.”
Mr. Saakashvili stepped down in Georgia after serving the constitutional limit of two terms, an exception in the former Soviet states where authoritarian leaders have bent the rules to stay on for decades.
But the government that succeeded him quickly set about prosecuting him. Along with the pardon case, the authorities in Georgia also accuse Mr. Saakashvili of repressing a protest and taking over a television station in 2007, of orchestrating an attack on an opposition politician and of wasting budget funds.

Source: www.nytimes.com