Bidzina Ivanishvili

Bidzina Ivanishvili (, also known as Boris Grigoryevich Ivanishvili; born 18 February 1956) is a Georgian politician and billionaire businessman, who served as Prime Minister of Georgia from October 2012 to November 2013. Ivanishvili was born on February 18, 1956, in the village of Chorvila, Sachkhere region, Western Georgia, then part of Soviet Union. He graduated in 1980 from Tbilisi State University's Faculty of Engineering and Economics. Ivanishvili later moved to Moscow to pursue a PhD in economics at the Moscow State University of Railway Engineering. He entered business during Perestroika and privatization era. Having amassed vast fortune during the Yeltsin's presidency, Ivanishvili left Russia in 2002 and returned to Georgia in 2003. He entered politics in 2012, when he founded the Georgian Dream-Democratic Georgia party. Ivanishvili became the leader of the coalition of opposition parties, and won a victory in the 2012 Georgian parliamentary election against the United National Movement party of incumbent President Mikheil Saakashvili. In late 2012, Ivanishvili took office as Prime Minister. In 2013, however, Ivanishvili resigned, claiming to have left politics. In 2018, he returned to politics and was elected as the chairman of the Georgian Dream-Democratic Georgia party. In 2021, he again left all political positions, stating he had achieved his political aims. However, he is commonly viewed as an éminence grise of Georgian politics. Under Ivanishvili's leadership, Georgia retained most of the reforms passed during Saakashvili's presidency. Georgia maintained the free market economic model created during Saakashvili's tenure, while also establishing a functional social safety net. The government introduced the universal healthcare system, which made state-sponsored health insurance available on a massive scale. The repressive state apparatus has been relaxed and the zero-tolerance policy pursued by the previous government has been abandoned, leading to a liberalization of the criminal policy and a large-scale amnesty which reduced Georgia's robust prison population by half. However, this did not result in return of Shevardnadze-era levels of corruption and crime.