Entrepreneur and politician Kakha Bendukidze: biography, achievements and interesting facts

Kakha Avtandilovich Bendukidze is a businessman and statesman who has become the architect of Georgian liberal economic reforms and tough anti-corruption measures.

Strong opponent of Putin

On November 15, 2014, thousands of demonstrators gathered in the center of Tbilisi to deliver a message to Vladimir Putin. They wanted to tell him to leave both Ukraine and Georgia in peace, where, according to many, the president of Russia is preparing to annex the rebellious province of Abkhazia. They also came to demand that the government stop the reorientation of 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 struggle becomes much more difficult," the young woman said, when a photo of Bendukidze, a Georgian billionaire reformer and educator who died at fifty-eight on November 13, 2014 from heart failure (he had recently undergone heart surgery in Zurich) - filled the 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 20.04.56 in Tbilisi in the family of mathematician Avtandil Domentevich Bendukidze and culturologist and historian Juliette Akakievna Rukhadze.

He studied biology in Tbilisi (1977) and Moscow (1980) state universities. Kakha Bendukidze, a laboratory biologist, started working. Biography of the businessman began in 1987, when the period of economic liberalization of Mikhail Gorbachev started. Bendukidze started his business by establishing a biochemical production of materials for scientific research. When in 1992 the government began to privatize state-owned enterprises, it expanded its holdings, buying among other companies the legendary heavy engineering plant Uralmash. Like most other people who participated in the privatization, Bendukidze became very rich.

He began to take part in political life in Russia, too. In 1992, together with Mikhail Khodorkovsky, he 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-growing 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, a new liberal government asked him to assume the post of Minister of Economy.

Kakha Bendukidze: the road to freedom

After the resignation of ex-President Eduard Shevardnadze , the new Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili was elected. He and his young liberal advisers inherited an incompetent state with almost complete lack of functioning institutions, sporadic power 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 became the 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 taxes on profits and wages, abolished other fees, 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, which allowed the state to take bribes. Kakha simply eliminated the entire system.

Breaking mentality

When Bendukidze began his reforms, the country depended to a large extent on the support of the United States, as well as institutions and organizations dealing with development issues. They believed that they deserved the right to vote in the economic policy of Georgia. Kakha Bendukidze believed that this was not so. Once, as his deputy at the time Vato Lezhava remembers, he told the USAID representative to "fall off". Bendukidze, who often cursed in public, did not tolerate any manifestations of dissent in relation to his belief that the liberalization of Georgia is its only salvation. Nevertheless, according to Lezhava, he was a "self-willed tactician". Bendukidze knew that time had to resort to radical measures and that the window of opportunity to implement such significant changes would quickly close. He had to break down the mentality formed by the years of communism.

Bitters

The result, according to his supporters, was staggering. By 2005, the budget of Georgia tripled, mainly because taxes, albeit lower, were collected, and its GDP each year increased by 10%. By 2009, the country rose from 147th to 11th in the World Bank's "ease of doing business."

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 appeared on anti-government demonstrations. In 2009, the host of the television talk show asked Bendukidze why he sold "forests and rivers". "It's just idiocy; Of course, we did not sell forests and rivers, "he said, explaining that some forests were leased and not sold.

Investing in the future

In 2009, Bendukidze was asked to leave the government, but he decided not to go to the opposition (which he called "morons uninterested in the economy"). Instead, he spent tens of millions on the creation of a new university, which was supposed to stand out from the gloomy landscape of post-Soviet education. He called him free and said that this 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. The students who called him Bendu still remember the giant figure in a black sweater with the Free Uni logo wandering along the corridors. In 2011, he also bought a dilapidated agricultural university. Both universities, whose total number of students reaches almost four thousand people, are now considered the best educational institutions in the country.

Loss to populists

The Saakashvili party lost the 2012 elections of the new Georgian Dream coalition, assembled by the billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili, who, like Bendukidze, made his fortune in Russia in the nineties. From his palace in a modernist style, located high on a hill in Tbilisi, 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 each village".

A few months after coming to power, the new government arrested several high-ranking officials from the previous administration and instituted criminal proceedings against the former president, which, according to the US State Department, is politically motivated. The government also instituted a criminal investigation into the privatization of the agricultural university. Ivanishvili personally spoke out against Bendukidze and his control over the university. "It is because of the ideology of Bendukidze that the Georgian village perished and went bankrupt," he said. "What right does he have now to teach agriculture to others?"

In Ukraine

When many of his closest associates were imprisoned 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 viewed the country as the cutting edge of the battle for liberal reforms in the states of the former USSR. With the same hard love that he showed towards the people of Georgia, Bendukidze urged Ukrainians to stop blaming others for their problems. "You broke all world records in idiocy," he told the audience at the Kiev School of Economics. - You continue to select populists, people who promise you more. This means that you choose the worst. " He advocated a reduction in public spending, a reduction in pension benefits for civil servants and a radical deregulation of the economy. According to Bendukidze, which he said in one of his recent 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.

The engine of change

Bendukidze created a charity fund called the Knowledge Foundation. He retained his passion for science and the ability to do 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 the company AquaBounty Technologies, which developed methods for the withdrawal of genetically modified fast-growing salmon.

In addition to Sister Nunu, Bendukidze's wife was Natalya Zolotova's wife and her daughter Anastasia Goncharova (born in 1990), who was unknown until her father's death, who through the court obtained access to the remains to conduct DNA expertise. She was officially recognized as the daughter of a Georgian billionaire in January 2016.

Bendukidze's death in London occurred just a few days before he had to officially start work in Poroshenko's office. Instead of the expected announcement of a new appointment, the President of Ukraine issued the following message on his Facebook page: "On behalf of the Ukrainian people I express my sincere condolences to Kakha Bendukidze's family and friends and millions of those for whom he was and will remain the engine of great changes."

Kakha Bendukidze: books

In 2015, Vladimir Fedorin, editor-in-chief of Forbes Ukraine magazine in 2011-13, published his dialogues with a Georgian businessman and politician. In Russia, the book was published under the title "The Road to Freedom. Conversations with Kakha Bendukidze ". It touches upon the themes of politics, Europe, Georgia, Ukraine, the Russian opposition, business, biology, education, etc. In the Ukrainian translation, the publication has one more symbolic name: "Goodbye, Empire. Conversations with Kakha Bendukidze. "