Bidzina Ivanishvili, the influential billionaire founder of Georgia’s ruling party, accused a Western “global party of war” of meddling in Georgia in a rare speech at a rally backing a bill on foreign agents that has sparked a political crisis in the South Caucasus country, Reuters reported.
Ivanishvili, who served as Georgia’s prime minister from 2012-2013 and remains influential within the ruling Georgian Dream party, said that Georgia and Ukraine had been treated as “cannon fodder” by Western countries, whose intelligence agencies he accused of political interference in the country.
“The financing of NGOs, which presents itself as help for us, is in reality for strengthening (foreign) intelligence agencies, and for bringing them to power,” he said.
The bill on foreign agents, which Georgian Dream introduced to parliament earlier this month, has touched off a political crisis in the deeply polarised country, with thousands of anti-bill protesters demonstrating nightly in Tbilisi.
The draft law would require organisations receiving more than 20% of their funding from abroad to register as “foreign agents”.
