Ex-aide to Georgia's Ivanishvili flees country to escape embezzlement trial

By Felix Light

TBILISI (Reuters) - A former aide to Georgia's most powerful man has fled the country in the middle of his trial on charges of embezzling cryptocurrency worth more than $700 million which he says are politically motivated.

Giorgi Bachiashvili denied defrauding Bidzina Ivanishvili, a billionaire former prime minister widely seen as Georgia's de facto leader, and said the accusations against him were revenge for opposing his former boss's stance on the Ukraine war.

Georgia's interior ministry said in a statement on Wednesday that Bachiashvili had crossed the country's land border with Armenia, "bypassing the official border checkpoint by using a specially equipped hiding place in a vehicle."

Georgia's TV Pirveli has reported that he has since moved on to a third country. Contacted by Reuters earlier this week, Bachiashvili declined to say where he was.

Georgian authorities said Bachiashvili had been charged with crossing the border illegally. Media cited Shalva Papuashvili, the speaker of parliament and a close ally of Ivanishvili, as saying the flight of the accused man confirmed his "criminality", and that he would eventually face prison.

Bachiashvili had been facing up to 12 years in jail if convicted of embezzling more than 8,000 bitcoin from Ivanishvili. He said he had fled after receiving threats that he would be harmed in jail.

In a post on Facebook, he said that his trial had been "a grotesque performance".

The embezzlement charges related to a 2015 loan from Ivanishvili's Cartu Bank, which Bachiashvili had sought to establish a cryptocurrency mining business.

Bachiashvili has said that the charges were aimed at punishing him for breaking with Ivanishvili by publicly supporting Ukraine in its war with Russia.

Ivanishvili, who is seen as controlling the ruling Georgian Dream party he founded, has steered traditionally pro-Western Georgia in a more pro-Russian direction since the outbreak of the war, while clamping down on opposition at home.

In December, he was sanctioned by the United States over a g crackdown on protesters opposed to the Georgian government's freezing of European Union accession talks until 2028.

The billionaire rarely appears in public, and has not commented on his former aide's flight.

(Reporting by Felix Light; Editing by Mark Trevelyan and Timothy Heritage)