Independent board member expresses "anger" over shotgun privatisation of public TV channel

July 17, 2010 by georgiamedia

Members of the board of Georgian Public Broadcasting were given just half an hour's notice of the government and the GPB director-general's decision to privatise the management of "First Caucasian" - the public Russian language service - reports an "angry" Sorena Shaverdasvili, an independent member of the board.

The new managers have been handed significant amounts of public money and there is no indication that there was any sort of tender process, writes Shaverdashvili, a senior Georgian journalist whose work was recently praised by Hillary Clinton, in her blog.

The channel is now being run by "Key One" - a Georgian company but run by a France-based British journalist and Georgian expert Robert Parsons (Shaverdashvili does praise Parsons).

Shaverdasvili questions the behaviour of most board members - who are political appointees of either the government or the parliamentary opposition - who did not even seek extra time to consider such a momentous decision or the processes behind it.

Quite why the government is so anxious to save a station that has negligible viewership - having lost a court case over its satellite broadcasting rights - is not clear. But it may be that this is a personal project of Mikheil Saakashvili and e was determined to keep it "on air" (it is actually only available on the internet at present) regardless of the business case and so acted to ensure that GPB could not

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