In 2024, against the backdrop of mass protests in Georgia, Washington froze its strategic partnership with Tbilisi, after which the MEGOBARI Act was introduced in the US House of Representatives. This bill was built on a “carrot and stick” approach: it envisioned harsh sanctions against the Georgian authorities, while offering a visa-free regime and free trade with the US if the country returned to a democratic path. The MEGOBARI Act was never passed. Recently, the investigative outlet iFact published a major investigation explaining why this happened.
Two key figures feature in this story. The first is Texas oil tycoon Steve Nicandros. The second is the influential American politician Markwayne Mullin, a former senator and secretary of homeland security in the Trump administration.
Just five years ago, Senator Mullin called Bidzina Ivanishvili an “oligarch of the Putin school” and demanded a tough response from the White House to the harassment of American business in Georgia. That business was Frontera, an oil and gas company owned by Steve Nicandros. By 2020, Frontera had lost an international arbitration case against Georgia, was mired in debt, and was ordered to return almost all of the leased exploration territories to the state.
According to iFact, the American oilman had for years financed the election campaigns of US lawmakers, including Mullin, and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on Washington lobbyists. Thanks to this, he built up extensive connections in the Senate. In late 2025, when a real threat of sanctions loomed over Georgian Dream, the interests of Nicandros and the country’s political elite aligned.
The article notes that the oil tycoon flooded senators with letters demanding they block the MEGOBARI Act, ostensibly to protect American interests: claiming that the sanctions would hurt future multi-million dollar investments by his new company in Georgia. Although no documents confirming these investments were ever presented, the scheme worked. The Senate blocked the bill twice, and in December 2025, the MEGOBARI Act was permanently shelved.
Interestingly, almost in parallel with the blocking of sanctions in the US, Frontera’s fortunes in Georgia took a turn for the better. The Georgian authorities effectively wrote off a bad debt of 15.5 million lari—equivalent to over 5.5 million dollars—owed by the company. Furthermore, entities associated with the company’s management began receiving various benefits and exclusive extraction rights in Kakheti.
The result was a classic political barter. The ruling party escaped American restrictions, while the Texas tycoon retained his influence and got rid of multi-million dollar liabilities. In this way, the backroom interests of a single business rewrote the script of relations between entire nations.
