By Georgy Kalatozishvili, Tbilisi. Exclusively for Vestnik Kavkaza
Kakha Bendukidze, a well-known businessman in Georgia and Russia, has been questioned by prosecutors over illegal privatization of state property. A criminal case was initiated for fraud and illegal acquisition.
In 2010, Bendukidze purchased the Agrarian University building and a few land lots for $5,150,000. Prosecutors say that the market price for the building was at least $35 million. If Bendukidze purchased the land and the building of the state university in a tender or an auction, it would be hard to find fault in his actions, but there was no tender. President Saakashvili gave him all the property for the sum paid.
So how did he acquire state property without an auction or any other normal form of privatization? President Saakashvili was not only in need of privatization of property, he wanted to revive the university,which had been deserted by the time it was sold. The Agrarian University was one of the least advanced and prestigious universities in the country. At the same time, poor agriculture is one of the main problems of the Georgian economy. The president was certainly eager to modernize the sector and wanted to start with the university. If the building and land lots were under sale at an auction, they could have been bought by other businessmen who wanted to build a casino or a restaurant. Even a precondition for the tender to keep the university guaranteed no success, because its purchasers could have failed to form a modern education center.
On the one hand, Bendukidze is not a very ordinary businessman. He is not only interested in money and shows enthusiasm in reforms similar to the ones implemented in Singapore or the Protestant states of the West. Being a libertarian to the core, he dreamed about the foundation of a university to grow a new westernized elite devoted to the ideas of liberalism, freedom of business and personal property. This is why Bendukidze bought the run-down building together with the land, invested tens of million of dollars and transformed the Agrarian University into a state-of-the-art computerized education center.
Bendukidze made no profit, the Agrarian University remains a center living on donations and will produce profit only in the future, when students start getting a good education, finding jobs in prestigious companies and paying back the loans for their studies at Bendukidze’s university. Thus, the “chief ideologist of the Georgian reformation” fell into the trap of any mass reforms: serious, deep reforms are impossible without extraordinary steps and political will and without breaking rules. Any commoner can always understand a prosecutor claiming that the method of direct sales is unjust and covered in corruption affairs. But one would never believe a businessman who expressed the passionate will to build a prestigious university that would be the essence of his personal ideas.
