Kakha Avtandilovich Bendukidze is a businessman and statesman who has become the architect of Georgian liberal economic reforms and tough anti-corruption measures.
A powerful opponent of Putin
On November 15, 2014, thousands of demonstrators gathered in the center of Tbilisi to convey a message to Vladimir Putin. They wanted to tell him to leave Ukraine and Georgia alone, where, according to many, the Russian president is preparing to annex the rebellious province of Abkhazia. They also came to demand that the government stop reorienting the country from the West to Russia. And finally, they came to honor the memory of a man who was a powerful ideological opponent of Putin.
“The fight gets a lot harder, ” the young woman said when a photograph of Bendukidze, a Georgian billionaire, reformer, and enlightener who died of heart failure on November 13, 2014 at the age of fifty-eight, (he recently had a heart operation in Zurich), filled a giant screen. Kakha Bendukidze, who undertook a libertarian restructuring of the Georgian economy, had strong supporters and opponents throughout the former Soviet Union. A great man of great intelligence and an appropriate personality, he was a model for many liberal reformers struggling with economic difficulties in the region.
short biography
Kakha was born on 04.20.56 in Tbilisi in the family of mathematician Avtandil Domentyevich Bendukidze and a culturologist and historian Juliet Akakievna Rukhadze.
He studied biology at Tbilisi (1977) and Moscow (1980) state universities. He began working as a laboratory biologist Kakha Bendukidze. The biography of the businessman began in 1987, when the period of economic liberalization of Mikhail Gorbachev began. Bendukidze began his business by establishing a biochemical production of materials for scientific research. When the government began privatizing state-owned enterprises in 1992, it expanded its holdings by buying the Uralmash legendary heavy engineering plant from other companies. Like most other people involved in privatization, Bendukidze became very wealthy.
He began to participate in political life also in Russia. In 1992, together with Mikhail Khodorkovsky created the "Entrepreneurial Political Initiative-92".
Bendukidze became an influential supporter of the openness of the Russian economy. But by 2003, as he later said, he saw ever-increasing signs of Putin's controlling approach to economic policy. A year later, he sold all his property in Russia and returned to his homeland, where after the Rose Revolution, the new liberal government asked him to take the post of Minister of Economy.
Kakha Bendukidze: the road to freedom
After the resignation of ex-president Eduard Shevardnadze, the new president of Georgia, Mikhail Saakashvili, was elected. He and his young liberal advisers inherited an incompetent state with an almost complete absence of functioning institutions, sporadic electricity supply and a small number of roads. They promised to turn the country into a prosperous modern democratic power, but had no idea how to do it. Georgia has become a laboratory of radical libertarianism Bendukidze. The governments of the countries of the former USSR observed him with distrust, since he not only quickly privatized state enterprises, but also abolished most of the regulatory bodies. Bendukidze reduced income taxes and wages, abolished other requisitions, customs tariffs and nearly eight hundred licenses and permits. According to Fadi Asli, chairman of the International Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Georgia, each permit was an instrument of corruption that allowed the state to take bribes. Kaha just eliminated the whole system.
Breaking the mentality
When Bendukidze began his reforms, the country depended heavily on the support of the United States, as well as development institutions and organizations. They believed that they earned the right to vote in the economic policy of Georgia. Kakha Bendukidze believed that this is not so. One day, as his deputy at the time, Vato Lezhava, recalled, he told the USAID spokesman to "roll off." Bendukidze, who often swore in public, did not tolerate any manifestations of dissent in relation to his belief that liberalization of Georgia was its only salvation. Nevertheless, according to Lezhava, he was a "masterful tactician." Bendukidze knew that time forced to resort to radical measures and that the window of opportunity for implementing such significant changes would quickly close. He had to break the mentality formed by the years of communism.
Bitters
The result, according to his supporters, was overwhelming. By 2005, Georgia’s budget had tripled, mainly because taxes, although reduced, were collected, and its GDP increased by 10% every year. By 2009, the country rose from 147th to 11th place in the World Bank's “ease of doing business” rating.
But government reforms, which included restructuring the public sector by eliminating thousands of jobs, were deeply unpopular among the population. During the privatization, Kakha Bendukidze became the target of public discomfort. The road to his office was often blocked by protesters who called him “Judah” and accused of “selling all of Georgia.” Caricatures of him were featured in anti-government demonstrations. In 2009, a television talk show host asked Bendukidze why he sold “forests and rivers.” “This is just idiocy; Of course, we did not sell forests and rivers, ”he said, explaining that some forests were leased out and not sold.
Investing in the future
In 2009, Bendukidze was asked to leave the government, but he decided not to go into the opposition (which he called “morons disinterested in the economy”). Instead, he spent tens of millions creating a new university, which was to stand out from the gloomy landscape of post-Soviet education. He called it free and said it would be a place that would make young Georgians think. Disputes and conversations with Kakha Bendukidze regularly took place within the walls of this educational institution. Students who called him Bendu still remember a gigantic figure in a black sweater with the Free Uni logo wandering through the corridors. In 2011, he also bought a dilapidated agricultural university. Both universities, the total number of students reaching almost four thousand people, are currently considered the best educational institutions in the country.
Losing populists
Saakashvili’s party lost the 2012 election of the new Georgian Dream coalition, assembled by billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili, who, like Bendukidze, made his fortune in Russia in the nineties. From his modernist-style palace, located high on Tbilisi’s hill, Ivanishvili promised voters new plants and jobs, as well as higher pensions. The coalition campaign was held under the promise that the billionaire "will give five million to every village."
A few months after coming to power, the new government arrested several senior officials from the previous administration and opened a criminal case against the former president, who, according to the US State Department, is politically motivated. The government also opened a criminal case on the privatization of the agricultural university. Ivanishvili personally opposed Bendukidze and his control over the university. “It was because of Bendukidze’s ideology that the Georgian village perished and went bankrupt, ” he said. “What right does he now have to teach agriculture to others?”
In Ukraine
When many of his closest associates ended up in prison or in exile, Kakha Bendukidze moved from Georgia to Ukraine. Here, President Petro Poroshenko invited him to become his economic adviser. Despite the uncertainty about the willingness of Ukrainians to accept the changes that he wanted to implement, Bendukidze agreed to work with the president of Ukraine, according to friends, because he saw the country as the front line of the battle for liberal reforms in the countries of the former USSR. With the same fierce love that he showed towards the residents of Georgia, Bendukidze called on Ukrainians to stop blaming others for their problems. “You broke all the world records in idiocy, ” he told the audience at the Kiev School of Economics. - You continue to elect populists, people who promise you more. That means you choose the worst. ” He advocated a reduction in government spending, a reduction in pension benefits for civil servants, and a radical deregulation of the economy. According to Bendukidze, who he said in one of his last interviews, there are too many ministries and departments in Ukraine. “Who needs them when the only function of the government today is to take money from the International Monetary Fund and transfer it as payment for Russian gas?” He asked.
Engine of change
Bendukidze created a charity fund called the Knowledge Fund. He retained his passion for science and the ability to conduct business and make investments, and in recent years has become interested in aquaculture. From 2010 to 2012, Bendukidze was one of the main shareholders of AquaBounty Technologies, which developed methods for the removal of genetically modified fast-growing salmon.
In addition to sister Nunu, Bendukidze had a wife, Natalia Zolotova, and daughter Anastasia Goncharova (born 1990), who remained unknown until her father’s death, who through court obtained access to the remains to conduct DNA testing. She was officially recognized as the daughter of a Georgian billionaire in January 2016.
The death of Bendukidze in London occurred just a few days before he was supposed to officially begin work in Poroshenko’s office. Instead of the expected announcement of a new appointment, the President of Ukraine published the following message on his Facebook page: “On behalf of the Ukrainian people, I express my sincere condolences to the relatives and friends of Kakha Bendukidze and to millions of those for whom he was and will remain the engine of great change.”
