In late May, a fugitive entrepreneur with control over a Bitcoin fortune walked into the lobby of an Abu Dhabi hotel for a routine meeting with a lawyer. Minutes later, he was surrounded by a group of security operatives, whisked away in a convoy of two cars and eventually blindfolded and bundled onto a secret private flight to his native Georgia. There, he was imprisoned and asked to transfer his Bitcoin to the Caucasus nation’s mercurial billionaire master. To reinforce the message, a goon was sent into his cell to beat him unconscious.
That, at least, is the entrepreneur’s account. According to him, this was the dramatic denouement to his relationship with the Georgian billionaire. More than a decade before, the two had been on the same side. The young man, George Bachiashvili, had worked for the billionaire, Bidzina Ivanishvili, helping manage his businesses and investments. Over time, as Mr. Ivanishvili secured almost total control over Georgia and Mr. Bachiashvili was drawn deeper into the world of cryptocurrency, things fell apart. Now they face each other as enemies, with one seemingly seeking the destruction of the other.
I spent many years covering the region as a journalist, and I have kept an eye on it ever since. A few months ago an acquaintance of mine in Tbilisi mentioned this story to me, describing it as a crypto heist with political overtones. The more I looked into it, the more significant it seemed. Over the past several weeks I have spoken with Mr. Bachiashvili’s lawyers, his mother and other people who know him. On the other side, I corresponded with Mr. Ivanishvili’s lawyer — who denied the allegations — and reviewed accounts of the case published by the Georgian media and watchdogs.
What I found is a story that tells us so much about our world today. It’s about the capture of entire states by individuals, a process unfolding in Hungary, Turkey and — alarmingly — the United States. It dramatizes the possibilities and perils of serving one all-powerful person, where blind loyalty is demanded and initiative punished, and underscores how easily people can become pawns in geopolitical games. But its most revealing feature is the technology underpinning it: cryptocurrency.
Bitcoin, created after the financial crash in 2009 by Satoshi Nakamoto, whose real identity remains a mystery, initially appealed to idealists and libertarians. It has since set the standard for cryptocurrencies to come. Though proponents point to the virtues of decentralized finance and blockchain, the field is also rife with malfeasance, speculation and esoteric tokens. Even as more and more crypto fortune holders are targeted by heists and kidnappings, would-be autocrats — not least President Trump, whose $Trump coin has already reportedly brought $5 billion to his family — are getting in on the action.
Cryptocurrencies are a wild frontier of wealth and power. And they are at the heart of this crazy cautionary tale.
It is no exaggeration to say that Mr. Ivanishvili rules Georgia. Reclusive, often ensconced in a hilltop mansion, he is something like Iran’s supreme leader, minus the religion and the formal title. Since his political party, the Georgian Dream, was voted into power in 2012, he has consolidated almost total control, rigging elections and sidelining opponents. In the process, Georgia has transformed from a flawed democracy looking to the West into a strange, Russia-aligned system driven largely by the whims of one man who holds no public office.
Back in the late 2000s, though, he was looking for something more prosaic: an eye doctor. Mr. Ivanishvili, whose family fortune is estimated to be $2.7 billion, had returned to Tbilisi from France. He was casting around for someone who could take care of his father and his kids, two of whom needed specialist eye care. He chose a well-respected ophthalmologist, Marina Ramazashvili. This was Mr. Bachiashvili’s mother.
During one visit, while Mr. Ivanishvili was waiting for his pupils to dilate, he fell into a conversation with his doctor. She recalls mentioning her son and his job at the Moscow office of Booz Allen Hamilton, where he was already getting bored with rote consultant work. Mr. Ivanishvili asked how much her son was making. Upon hearing the salary figure — $10,000 a month — Mr. Ivanishvili deemed him to be a “serious man,” according to Ms. Ramazashvili. He had her write down her son’s phone number on a piece of paper.
Mr. Bachiashvili, who holds dual Georgian and Russian citizenship, soon joined Mr. Ivanishvili’s sprawling, multi-industry business empire. With an M.B.A. from an elite French business school, he quickly rose through the ranks and helped his billionaire boss sell off his Russian assets before entering Georgian politics. When Mr. Ivanishvili became prime minister in 2012 — a post he relinquished a little more than a year later, preferring to rule from the shadows — Mr. Bachiashvili joined his team, serving as a financial adviser.
Before long, he was helping manage Mr. Ivanishvili’s personal fortune. He proved himself adept at that, leading a global legal campaign to hold Credit Suisse accountable for negligence after a wealth manager there stole hundreds of millions from Mr. Ivanishvili. But Mr. Bachiashvili also had another important role: running a marquee private equity fund, partially financed by Mr. Ivanishvili, to invest in the Georgian economy and attract foreign investment. That’s where Bitcoin caught his eye.
Though cryptocurrency was then a niche industry, Georgia was already hosting one of the biggest global blockchain companies, Bitfury. Taking advantage of the country’s low electricity prices and openness to foreign investment — a legacy of Mr. Ivanishvili’s predecessor, Mikheil Saakashvili, who is now in prison on charges widely regarded as trumped up — the company chose to build an innovative data center in Tbilisi, using computers submerged in a cooling liquid to mine Bitcoin.
Under Mr. Bachiashvili, the private equity fund helped finance Bitfury’s expansion. It was an exciting time. Val Vavilov, Bifury’s co-founder, came up with the idea of putting Georgia’s land registry on the blockchain to create an immutable and decentralized record of ownership and transactions. He had plans to add smart contracts — self-executing agreements that live on the blockchain and are carried out when preset conditions have been met — but it never came to pass. The idea was so novel that it merited its own Harvard Business School case study.
Mr. Bachiashvili became a true believer in Bitcoin’s future. And he wanted to put his own skin in the game.
“But if Bitcoin starts dropping, even if they give you Bitcoins, then what?”
It was 2015, and Mr. Ivanishvili was grilling his young aide. Mr. Ivanishvili was unimpressed — I’ve seen the transcript of the recorded call — by a personal deal Mr. Bachiashvili was making to rent mining capacity from Bitfury. But his charge was on to a good thing. Taking out a loan of $5 million, to which he added $1.3 million of his own savings, Mr. Bachiashvili emerged with more than 24,000 Bitcoin. He sold roughly half of them to pay back the principal and interest on the loan, from a bank then owned by Mr. Ivanishvili. By 2016, his remaining Bitcoin was already worth nearly $12 million.
It was a risky, brilliant bet, and it set the direction for the next decade of Mr. Bachiashvili’s life. He established himself as a globally minded venture capitalist investing in technology start-ups through his firm, Mission Gate. Gradually, he disengaged from Mr. Ivanishvili and eventually stopped working for him altogether. He began to develop serious misgivings about Georgia’s new direction under his former boss. He spoke out against the government’s pro-Russian tilt in 2022 and condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that year.
Not long after, Georgian prosecutors suddenly decided to revisit the nearly decade-old Bitcoin deal. Mr. Ivanishvili claimed that the young entrepreneur stole the Bitcoin from him and should return it. His argument was that the original bank loan extended to Mr. Bachiashvili entitled him to a proportional share of the gains. Mr. Ivanishvili essentially wanted to be paid twice: once with interest for the loan, and then again for the Bitcoin generated with that loan. The Bitcoin in question is now worth roughly $1 billion.
Mr. Ivanishvili might have been wary about Bitcoin 10 years ago, but he is interested in it now. His lawyer told me the 2015 recording suggesting that Mr. Ivanishvili was skeptical of Bitcoin is “not authentic” and contains “traces of editing.” But even this allegedly tampered version, he said, doesn’t disprove the fact that Mr. Ivanishvili should be considered the true investor in the bulk of the deal. He is, his lawyer wrote in a Facebook post, simply “demanding his cryptocurrency, illegally appropriated by Mr. Bachiashvili.”
The criminal investigation ratcheted up, and in 2023 Mr. Bachiashvili was charged. He entered a state of legal limbo. Mr. Ivanishvili and his handpicked political leaders, meanwhile, were becoming paranoid about perceived enemies, both foreign and domestic. It surely didn’t help Mr. Bachiashvili’s cause that after contested parliamentary elections — in which Georgian Dream’s widely attested electoral fraud and manipulation spurred enormous street protests — he criticized the state’s crackdowns and defended the protesters’ pro-European aspirations.
By March of this year, Mr. Bachiashvili’s conviction seemed imminent. He decided it was time to run.
Early one morning in Tbilisi, Mr. Bachiashvili slipped his government minders and wedged himself into a tight hiding place between the trunk and the back seat of a dark blue Toyota Camry purchased for the occasion. (You can watch a re-enactment of his escape, constructed by the Georgian security service.)
A smuggler drove him undetected to a checkpoint on the border with the neighboring Armenia and he crossed into the country on foot, using a Russian passport in his name, according to investigators. From there Mr. Bachiashvili flew to the United Arab Emirates, presumed to be safe given the country’s reputation as a business-friendly place for crypto investors. A week after his escape from Georgia, he was convicted in absentia of theft and money laundering and sentenced to 11 years in prison.
In the United Arab Emirates, Mr. Bachiashvili rented a luxury beachfront villa on Saadiyat Island in Abu Dhabi, where his parents joined him. He fed the neighborhood cats and plotted his next moves. He didn’t plan to linger long in the Emirates and wanted to travel onward through France to Mexico, his mother told me. But his two attempts to fly out of Abu Dhabi and then Dubai were both thwarted when Emirati airport officials, without explanation, refused to let him leave the country.
Mr. Bachiashvili didn’t know it, but it appears that an elaborate operation to abduct him was already underway. Sometime in the spring, a Dubai-based entrepreneur named Timur Kudratov had filed a complaint with the Emirati authorities alleging that Mr. Bachiashvili had borrowed over $500,000 from him and never paid it back. Under Emirati law, an unpaid debt can be enough to put a red flag next to someone’s name and prevent him from leaving the country.
Mr. Bachiashvili says he had never met Mr. Kudratov and never borrowed money from him. Getting wind of what was up, he dispatched an urgent letter to a local lawyer saying as much. The Emirati authorities soon threw out the complaint, his lawyer said, freeing Mr. Bachiashvili to travel internationally. But he was out of time.
On May 24, Mr. Bachiashvili left his beachfront villa to meet a lawyer at a nearby hotel. After the meeting, as he and his security guard were about to drive back to the villa, a group of six to eight plainclothes officers approached the car and asked Mr. Bachiashvili to step out. They introduced themselves as members of the Abu Dhabi criminal investigation department. Some wore traditional Emirati dress, while others wore Western clothes and didn’t look or sound local. To Mr. Bachiashvili, who later relayed the experience to his lawyer, some of them looked Russian or Eastern European.
In two unmarked cars, the men drove him to local police headquarters. It was the start of a two-day police safari, with Mr. Bachiashvili taken to Dubai and back. At the end of it, he was driven, shackled and handcuffed, to what seemed like a private airfield. After managing to shift his blindfold, he could see the signature red and white colors of a Georgian jet. He told his captors that he feared for his safety and for his life, but they ignored him.
He was escorted into the jet, and his blindfold and restraints were removed. He told his lawyer he saw about five or six people and immediately recognized the head of Georgia’s state security agency and a former bodyguard for Mr. Ivanishvili. As the jet took off, they urged him not to talk about the circumstances of his abduction in order not to foreclose the possibility for future negotiation. He was blindfolded again so that he couldn’t see the pilot when he came out of the cockpit to use the bathroom. The rest of the flight, he told his lawyer, was pure psychological torture.
One part of the mystery is clear. The jet that brought Mr. Bachiashvili back to Tbilisi belonged to the Georgian national carrier, according to a recent report in Business Media, a Georgian publication, and flew with its transponder off for most of the trip. The Georgian carrier told the publication that it’s a private jet anyone can rent and the company can’t disclose its clients; Mr. Ivanishvili’s lawyer says the Georgian leader never ordered or asked anyone to forcibly return Mr. Bachiashvili to Georgia. But it’s not hard to wonder who might have been behind it.
Why did the Emirates allow and seemingly abet the abduction? One theory I’ve heard is that the Gulf nation coveted the top job at the United Nations tourism agency, a post long held by a veteran Georgian diplomat. Sure enough, 10 days before Mr. Bachiashvili was abducted, Georgia abruptly withdrew its candidate who was up for re-election and supported a rival Emirati candidate, who proceeded to win the position. The Emirates’ foreign ministry didn’t respond to emails requesting comment, and the Emirati embassy in Washington acknowledged receiving questions about the case but didn’t answer any of them. If the theory is true, it would be one of the stranger reasons to help hand over a fugitive.
When the Georgian jet landed in Tbilisi, Mr. Bachiashvili was taken to prison, where he had a conversation with the prison’s director. He was told to turn over his crypto wallets and bank accounts to Mr. Ivanishvili, or else be prepared to encounter various crazy characters in jail. He refused. Within days of the warning, a man entered Mr. Bachiashvili’s cell and brutally beat him up. It was July 11, just days after Mr. Bachiashvili’s 40th birthday. “There was a pool of blood in the cell, the walls were also covered in blood,” he wrote in a letter to his lawyer.
Mr. Ivanishvili’s lawyer says the Georgian leader never ordered or asked anyone to threaten, extort or beat up Mr. Bachiashvili. The Georgian government, for its part, has offered a muddled explanation of the kidnapping. “Even if we imagine such an operation theoretically, it would be fully within the law,” the prime minister, an ally of Mr. Ivanishvili, said. “When someone has been sentenced to 11 years in prison and is captured in the course of such an operation, the law is being enforced from start to finish.” The Georgian security service said, implausibly, that Mr. Bachiashvili was captured in the borderlands between Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan.
Meanwhile, Bitfury’s data center in Tbilisi — the source of both Mr. Bachiashvili’s fortune and misfortune — lies dormant and disused. Electricity prices have climbed over the past decade and the broader business environment in Georgia has deteriorated. Besides, the industry itself has become increasingly commoditized, and Bitfury has diversified from its Georgian mining origins to other blockchain software and hardware businesses. The company has also adapted its liquid-cooling data center concept, honed in Georgia, to serve the booming artificial intelligence market globally.
Languishing in prison, Mr. Bachiashvili still hasn’t given up his Bitcoin.
Philip Shishkin is a reporter, an investment analyst and the author of “Restless Valley: Revolution, Murder and Intrigue in the Heart of Central Asia.”
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