Ruling party rejects reports on party’s Honorary Chair purchasing real estate in Russia

The ruling Georgian Dream party on Friday rejected an article published by the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project alleging Bidzina Ivanishvili, the founder and Honorary Chair of the ruling party, on purchasing real estate in Russia a few months ago, by calling it a “complete lie”.

The party said the article was based on “false information” and noted “spreading such lies without any evidence does not fit any kind of journalistic standards” adding Ivanishvili had not purchased real estate and that “neither he nor any of his family members had visited Russia since 1998”.

As for another manipulative part of the article built on lies - it is not hidden from anyone that Ivanishvili worked in Russia for years and accumulated a large part of assets in this country. In the property declaration filed in 2013, the Honorary Chair stated that his wife Ekaterine Khvedelidze owned a house and three plots of land in the capital of Russia”, the party said.

Accordingly, the attempt to portray the information as a ‘scandal’, which has been public for 11 years and all of this is reflected in the declaration, indicates only one thing - the author of the article has an order to impudently spread incorrect information about Ivanishvili and his family”, the release added.

The party stated they considered this as a “continuation of the 13-year hysteria that a number of foreign and local radical opposition media outlets” had been attempting to continuously carry out, but had not “achieved the desired results”.

Since the arrival of Ivanishvili in politics these people tried to find some kind of compromising facts, but they never managed to come up with anything but lies and lies, because, naturally, there is no fact  that could exist against the honorary chairman of the ruling party and his family”, the party said.

During the preparation of the lie-soaked article, its author a certain Kelly Bloss, communicated with the press service of the ruling party, though the questions sent by them clearly indicated that there was no point in establishing business relations with them, and it was equally clear to us that the article was determined to spread false and manipulative information about Ivanishvili and his family”, the statement noted.

The statement also said if everything happened exactly as described in the article, then none of the “false details” provided by the authors would contain “any violation of the law - neither the purchase of property nor its possession”.

The saddest thing about this story is that the media outlets that are spreading this false article are funded by organisations such as the Open Society Foundation, Soros Foundation, the United States Agency for International Development, the National Endowment for Democracy, Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency and others”, the party release said.

The ruling party urged the author of the article and the media outlet she works for, as well as organisations that finance “propaganda based on lies to refrain from spreading obvious lies next time”.

It also urged donors to “share the responsibility for spreading lies and carefully consider the issue of financing such media in the future”.