Second Georgian opposition leader placed in pre-trial detention as crackdown widens
TBILISI, May 30 (Reuters) - A Georgian court on Friday placed Nika Melia, a leader of the country's main opposition party, in pre-trial detention, amid a widening crackdown against a pro-Western opposition that has staged months of anti-government protests.
Melia, a top leader of the Coalition for Change opposition bloc, was detained on Thursday for refusing to appear at a parliamentary inquiry into alleged crimes committed under jailed former President Mikheil Saakashvili between 2004 and 2012.
The length of the detention was not immediately clear.
Last week, a judge placed another leader of the Coalition for Change, Zurab Japaridze, in pre-trial detention for refusing to appear before the inquiry.
Friday's hearing was disorderly, with Melia sentenced after being removed from the courtroom for throwing water at the judge from the dock.
Previously one of the most pro-Western and democratic of the Soviet Union's successor states, Georgia under the leadership of the Georgian Dream party is accused by the ruling bloc's critics of moving in an authoritarian and pro-Russian direction.
Georgian Dream says it still wants the country to eventually join the European Union but wants to preserve what it calls Georgia's traditional values and also to avoid conflict with Russia, its giant neighbour and former imperial ruler.
Separately on Friday, another judge jailed a 19-year-old student activist for 12 days for insulting a Georgian Dream lawmaker she had called a "Russian slave" in a cafe this month.
Georgian Dream, after winning an election last November that the opposition says was rigged, said it would halt talks on joining the EU till 2028. EU membership has wide support among Georgians and the goal has been enshrined in the constitution.
The ruling party's decision to suspend the talks sparked mass street protests, prompting a violent crackdown and large-scale arrests by security forces.
Georgian Dream is dominated by billionaire ex-prime minister Bidzina Ivanishvili, who is widely seen as Georgia's de facto leader.
In December, the United States sanctioned Ivanishvili for what it said were actions aimed at dismantling Georgian democracy for the benefit of Russia.
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But the problem has wide applicability, Demmond said. 'There are no American coffee growers. There are no coffee farms here,' she said. 'That's an impossibility. All you're doing is increasing prices. You're not helping create jobs by taxing that stuff. Some of it is impossible to re-shore.' Georgia calls itself the Peach state, but California has long eclipsed Georgia's peach production. Instead, the most widely exported Georgia peach has been the one moviegoers see at the end of the credits: Georgia had $2.6bn in film and television production in 2023. Georgia's tax incentive program is among the most aggressive in the US and the reason Georgia has become a rival to Hollywood. It's an economic development strategy that has unusually bipartisan support in a state famously split down the middle politically. Studios have invested billions in Georgia over the last 10 years. Between Disney's Marvel movies like The Avengers, Tyler Perry's studios in Atlanta and Netflix productions like Stranger Things, Georgia has overtaken Hollywood as a center for cinematic production. In any given year, studios spend $2-$4bn making movies in Georgia, according to figures from the Georgia Film Office. But the tax-incentive-chasing film industry is fickle. Acres of shiny new studio space springing up across the state have not prevented the movie business from slowing down a bit over the last couple of years. With the release of Thunderbolts*, for the first time in more than a decade no Marvel movies are slated for production in Georgia. Disney has shifted to studios in England and Australia. So when Donald Trump said he wanted a 100% tariff on foreign-produced films, Georgia Entertainment CEO Randy Davidson did a double take. 'It kind of took people by surprise,' Davidson said. 'You know, on the one hand, you have people that have been struggling with their jobs here already, thinking initially that was going to be like a quick-fix answer to get production back here. … And then there was the other side: how is politicizing movies into the tariff discussion beneficial? Because it doesn't make sense.' Trump's tariff talk emerged after a meeting at the White House with actor Jon Voight and independent film producer Steven Paul. Voight proposed to support the domestic film industry with federal tax credits and international cooperative production agreements, not with a tariff, said Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, Sag-Aftra's chief negotiator and national executive director. 'You know, we haven't had a federal tax incentive in the United States,' Crabtree-Ireland said. 'It's quite common in a lot of major production centers around the world now, and I think it's definitely time for us to have that conversation.' Films are largely a digital service today. Setting aside the logistical difficulty of assessing a tariff on intellectual property, doing so would violate American law. Crabtree-Ireland suggested that Trump's rhetoric might be an aggressive negotiating ploy, starting out with an extreme stand that moves a compromise point to a more favorable position. But a workable plan would have more nuance, Crabtree-Ireland said: 'Which is what I think ultimately would be under consideration.' Crabtree-Ireland said he wouldn't expect a federal tax incentive to supplant state tax credits. But any international agreement to level the incentive playing field would have to address it. 'What Georgia can hope for is that this topic does not get entangled in a charged-up political atmosphere where it will have a shot to be an actual bipartisan effort and initiative that would actually be good for the country,' Davidson said. As Georgia companies try to manage inventory before a tariff deadline, warehouse space is only one issue. Capital is another. 'Most companies can't afford to get two years' worth of inventory to manage their business while we figure out what's going to happen, right? So, they're going to buy a little time, but not a lot,' said Carl Campbell, an executive director for business recruitment at the Dalton chamber of commerce. Not that there's a warehouse to be rented in Dalton right now. The north Georgia mill town of about 34,000 in far-right representative Marjorie Taylor Greene's district is a longstanding center of the carpet-and-flooring industry in the US. But it has had competition for warehouse and industrial space in recent years from solar panel manufacturers, spurred by state tax incentives, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and federal incentives for the semiconductor industry. 'Everything's full, you know.' Campbell said. 'We've got companies that are going to grow manufacturing capacity. They're currently deciding where to do it, and so the tariffs may swing it to the US. Sometimes that's swinging that our way. Sometimes it's making that decision happen sooner rather than later, and sometimes it makes it not happen at all.' Campbell notes that both Democrats and Republicans can lay claim to Dalton's industrial successes. Qcells, a solar panel manufacturer owned by the Korean conglomerate Hanwha, is an example, he said. 'When Trump was in office the first time, he implemented tariffs on goods from China,' Campbell said. 'They suddenly got very, very serious about doing panel production and assembly in the US. And they had to do that quickly and as fast as possible.' The same tariff regime began imposing costs on imported flooring from Asia, which boosted Dalton's flooring manufacturers. Three years later, the Inflation Reduction Act – enacted under Joe Biden – added incentives for clean energy manufacturing, and Georgia's two Democratic senators, Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, worked to make sure some of the benefit landed in Georgia. About $23bn has been invested in clean energy production in the state since the act passed. Qcells used those incentives to expand in 2023, and employs more than 2,000 people today. 'Tariffs are sometimes a tale of winners and losers. And so, yeah, we won a little bit on that,' Campbell said. 'And of course, some of our companies got hurt, and they lost a little bit on that.' The problem, again, is uncertainty, he said. 'It can create an opportunity for folks like me and companies like ours, yeah, but it can also crush business plans – if you're reliant on foreign goods and suddenly you just took a 25% hit on your cost. It's made some people sit on their hands and not move forward on some efforts that we were thinking would happen soon. It's made some other folks, you know, escalate plans and have to do them faster.'
