Irakli Abesadze, a lawyer and head of the NGO “Civil Participation Center,” writes that the Tbilisi City Hall has decided to demolish the so-called “Rike Jugs.”
“The ‘Rike Jugs’ will be demolished, and a hotel, casino, and restaurants will be built in their place. Tbilisi City Hall, led by Kakha Kaladze, has already issued a demolition permit.
This is large-scale corruption—effectively acquiring one of the best investment land plots in Georgia for free,” Abesadze wrote.
As a reminder, it was previously reported that the Tbilisi City Hall intends to dismantle the so-called “Rike Jugs.” As explained by Kakha Kaladze, the mayor and secretary general of the ruling Georgian Dream party, they “do not fit into the urban development of the city in any way; they are non-functional, completely neglected, and have become a garbage dump.”
Prior to this, Irakli Abesadze, head of the NGO “Civil Participation Center,” published a post claiming that the so-called “Rike Jugs” (the property is located in Rike Park, in the old part of Tbilisi — Ed.) had been sold again. At this stage, the owner is Rike Dom, a company directed by Mikheil Tkeshelashvili, an employee of the office of Georgia’s Business Ombudsman.
According to the NGO, Tkeshelashvili manages business shares belonging to Georgian Dream MP Giorgi Barvenashvili. Meanwhile, the owner of the property is N.G.B. — whose shareholder <in the company> is Tornike Kopaliani, who is a financial manager of the development company Archi Group.
Meanwhile, Archi denied this information, stating that neither the company nor any of its employees have any connection to the purchase of the property in Rike Park in the old part of Tbilisi.
David Khidasheli himself, a businessman close to Georgian Dream and a witness in the so-called cartographers’ case (the David Gareji monastery case, concerning the Georgian-Azerbaijani border — Ed.), stated that he sold the “Rike Jugs” because the project he intended to implement in Rike Park could not be realized due to the “unstable investment climate” in Georgia.
It is worth noting that the Fuksas architectural studio, led by the renowned Italian architect Massimiliano Fuksas, spent six years working on the “tubes.” The “Rike tubes” were intended to house a music theater and an exhibition hall. The glass and concrete structures, clad in stainless steel, resemble a periscope, which, according to the architects’ concept, was meant to blend the modern style of Rike Park with the historic part of Tbilisi. However, the completed structure was never used for its intended purpose.