The Tbilisi City Court has sentenced former Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili to six years in prison in a case concerning the beating of an opposition member of parliament. 

Saakashvili was sentenced in absentia, having left Georgia after the end of his second presidential term in 2013. The Georgian authorities said they would seek his extradition after Saakashvili was sentenced to three years in prison earlier this year for seeking to cover up the murder of banker Sandro Girgvliani by interior ministry officials in a separate case. 

The Tbilisi court found Saakashvili guilty of abuse of power and seeking to conceal evidence about the beating of Valeri Gelashvili back in 2005, the year after Saakashvili became president. 

Saakashvili has also been banned from holding any official position in Georgia for two years and three months. 

The court said in a statement that the attack on Gelashvili was ordered after he published an article in the newspaper Resonance about Saakashvili’s personal life. 

Former interior minister Ivane Merabishvili was sentenced in the same case in 2017, when he was found guilty of aggravated assault on Gelashvili. 

When announcing Merabishvili’s sentence, the Tbilisi City Court said that Saakashvili had initially asked Georgia’s then defence minister Irakli Okruashvili to orchestrate the attack on Gelashvili, but approached Merabishvili after the defence minister refused. 

Describing the attack, the court said that members of the Special Forces Unit “took Valeri Gelashvili from the car together with his accompanying persons forcibly and by threatening with firearms, beat him severely with the butts of firearms and had unlawfully took from him the ‘Heckler Koch’ firearm being in legal ownership of Valeri Gelashvili, money — $10,000 and [a] ring, valued at GEL50,000. 

“As a result of [the] beating, Valeri Gelashvili suffered grave bodily injuries,” it added. 

The former president has denied all the charges against him, which his supporters say are politically motivated. 

Saakashvili has a dramatic and chequered political record since he came to power in the aftermath of Georgia’s Rose Revolution. He was hailed by Western leaders as a reformer as Tbilisi pursued radical anti-corruption reforms under his presidency and embarked on a resolutely pro-western course, seeking to bring his country closer to the EU and Nato — a course that brought tiny Georgia into direct conflict with regional power Russia in the five-day war of August 2008. 

But his United National Movement lost power in the parliament to billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili’s newly created Georgian Dream party in 2012 and, prevented by the Georgian constitution from standing for a third term as president, left the country shortly after his second term expired. 

Since then, numerous criminal investigations have targeted the former president, from the beating of Gelashvili and murder of Girgvliani, to exceeding his powers in the raid on his political rival Arkady "Badri" Patarkatsishvili’s television station Imedi TV, and embezzlement of state funds. 

Excluded from politics in his home country, Saakashvili built a new political career in Ukraine, where he supported the Euromaiden movement, and was appointed governor of the Odesa region by President Petro Poroschenko. But after falling out with Poroschenko, he was stripped of his Ukrainian citizenship while on a trip to the US. 

In September last year, Saakashvili re-entered Ukraine despite having no passport, dragged across the Polish-Ukrainian border by a crowd of supporters. Five months later, however, he was deported from Ukraine back to Poland, after a dramatic arrest in a downtown Kyiv restaurant; video footage from the arrest shows him being dragged out of the building with officers holding him by the hair. 

Having lost both Georgian and Ukrainian citizenship, Saakashvili is now stateless. He is reportedly in the Netherlands.