Posted by Valeri Odikadze:
(Valeri Odikadze is the Georgian co-producer of Power Trip.)
These elections were the most important in my life. Bidzina Ivanishvili seems like a good choice to lead our country and I am really glad the Georgian Dream coalition won the election. After all, almost all of Georgia wanted change.
For the last 4-5 years Mikheil Saakashvili lead Georgia in the wrong direction. There were too many problems with free media, human rights, free law, and a huge high level elite corruption and business monopoly. There wasn’t any economic growth. Ivanishvili promises a lot and Saakashvili is now in opposition. Saakashvili will try to come back in several years or even earlier and the USA and Europe consider him a very democratic President.
Last year I worked for Ivanishvili ever since he started his party. I filmed all his pre-election actions and provided a live TV signal for his campaign. I also had several ongoing contracts with TV9 and I provided them with consulting services and video production equipment & cameras since the government had damaged his equipment at customs. Many people were afraid to work with him under the pressure of the KGB police revenue service.
At the beginning of last summer the Revenue Service started an urgent 2-phase audit of my company, Videoscope, as a result of my cooperation with Ivanishvili and the Georgian Dream coalition. They initially fined Videoscope a penalty of GEL 120,000, rougly $72,154 USD – a huge and unjustified sum of money for my small company that nearly bankrupted us. The fine was over allegedly unpaid taxes, but my company had paid several thousand GEL in advance tax payments so far. The 2nd audit was concluded in August 2012 and I am still waiting for the results.
But I continued working with Ivanishvili and hope that I will someday get this money back. Even more importantly, I hope that Georgia will become a better country under the leadership of this fantastic new team!
Read some details about the election here!
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