'I would die in jail'

Giorgi Bachiashvili is on the run. The urbane 39-year-old slipped a surveillance team two months ago to flee his home in Tbilisi, Georgia, midway through a trial at which he was destined to be sentenced to 11 years in jail.

- By Daniel Boffey

An Interpol red notice has been requested by the Georgian authorities asking law enforcement to find and arrest him over a $42m crime. He further claims to have been informed by the intelligence services of two countries that there is a plot to kill him. "Groups from the northern Caucasus, most likely Chechens," he said.

For more than a decade, Bachiashvili worked for Bidzina Ivanishvili, the reclusive billionaire who as the honorary chair of the Georgian Dream party is widely regarded as Georgia's de facto leader, ruling from a hilltop business centre and residence in Tbilisi.

In December last year, Ivanishvili was put under US economic sanctions for "undermining the democratic and Euro-Atlantic future of Georgia for the benefit of the Russian Federation".

He was further accused by the US of overseeing the violent repression of hundreds of thousands of people protesting on the streets of Tbilisi over his turn against the west and seeming alignment of Georgia with Moscow, the place he first made his fortune after the breakup of the Soviet Union.

Bachiashvili said he was the businessman-cum-politician's "closest person, right-hand man". "Consigliere, I would not say," he added. "As consiglieri do the shady stuff as well."

Arguably few people have a more intimate understanding of the enigmatic mind of Ivanishvili, Georgia's richest man, who was once an advocate of European Union membership.

It is Ivanishvili who is today driving the hunt to jail Bachiashvili, the latter said, after a spectacular falling out. Bachiashvili asked the Guardian for the location of the interview to be kept a secret due to fears for his safety.

His account, albeit one from someone who has a grievance and is on the run, offers perhaps the most telling insight yet into Ivanishvili, the man accused of bringing Georgia back into Moscow's sphere, three and a half decades after the fall of the Soviet Union.