Georgian prosecutors have charged five people—including a senior transport official—over alleged embezzlement and fraud at a state-funded construction project suspected of contributing to the collapse of a highway bridge.
At a Monday press briefing, Malkaz Kapanadze, head of the Department for Combating Corruption Crimes, identified Kupatashvili as the only named defendant. The former Roads Department deputy head has been arrested and faces up to 11 years in prison if convicted of embezzlement and abuse of official powers.
Four others have been charged in absentia—an unnamed director and two project managers at Akkord, the Azerbaijani construction firm that won the 2018 state contract, and the lead engineer of an international consortium that supervised the works. They face up to nine years in prison for alleged embezzlement and forgery, Kapanadze said.
In February 2023, the bridge under construction on the Samtredia-Grigoleti Highway in western Georgia was damaged by flooding and later collapsed. No one was injured, according to a Roads Department statement at the time.
Neither Akkord nor its Georgian subsidiary responded to OCCRP’s requests for comment.
Prosecutors allege that Akkord representatives falsified supervision certificates for on-site work that was never performed, and that the consortium’s expert confirmed them. Kupatashvili is accused of approving the documents and authorizing a payment of 1,172,539 Georgian lari (US$427,935) to the expert for unperformed work, according to Kapanadze.
Akkord allegedly “fraudulently obtained” an additional 3,859,678 lari (US$1.4 million) for incomplete or substandard work that prosecutors say led to the bridge’s collapse. Including restoration costs, state losses exceed 16 million lari (US$5.8 million), Kapanadze said.
iFact, OCCRP’s Georgian member center, has previously reported on other allegedly incomplete or abandoned projects in Georgia, involving Akkord.
The company’s ownership remains opaque, as Azerbaijani law has treated corporate data as a commercial secret since 2012. Georgian filings from 2022 show that 51 percent of Akkord’s Azerbaijani parent firm was owned by VIP Estate and 49 percent by Derya Veliyev, the company’s supervisory board chair. Earlier records list VIP Estate’s original shareholder as Solos LLC, whose representative was businessman and former tax official Ashraf Kamilov, though it is unclear if he remains involved.
OCCRP has previously reported on Kamilov’s close business ties to Azerbaijan’s ruling family.
Leaked documents from the Pandora Papers revealed that Kamilov appeared alongside members of the Aliyev family in 10 offshore companies. In three cases, it was Kamilov who acquired a BVI company, amassed valuable real estate, and then transferred it to the Aliyev family. The leak also showed that Kamilov co-owned a major Azerbaijani construction materials plant with the president’s youngest daughter, Arzu Aliyeva, who held her stake through a secretive British Virgin Islands-registered company.
Kamilov did not respond to OCCRP’s earlier requests for comment.
