"I am not going to leave this building, come and expel me with use of force,” Gvaramia said in a live broadcast from Rustavi 2 headquarters after midnight on Friday, according to www.civil.ge.
After a frenetic day of live broadcasts and sharp critiques of the court’s ruling by diplomats and civil society organizations who called it an assault on press freedom, the station remained on the air Friday night with no sign of the new managers.
One of those new managers said they have no plans to force their way in, and urged the current staff to show “good will” and cooperate with the court-ordered takeover.
According to www.dfwatch.net, Davit Dvali, one of the interim bosses, offered to meet the current management at some neutral location to discuss matters. “I consider you my future co-workers,” he said. “We can meet wherever and however you want. "Let's discuss all the doubts or issues you might have."
The court ruling was the latest in a bitter dispute over the ownership of Rustavi 2, which the government’s ruling Georgian Dream coalition believes is a hotbed of supporters of former President Mikheil Saakashvili and his United National Movement party.
The court ruling is not final, but appoints the new team as temporary managers pending the completion of various appeals. Gvaramia, however, maintains the court action was illegal.
Ownership of the station has changed frequently over the years, with its true owners often hidden in a maze of offshore corporations. The private station, which was founded by three men in 1994, played a major role in Saakashvili’s rise to power by strongly supporting him during the 2003 Rose Revolution.
But as its popularity and profitability soared, the station began to change hands. The three founders (one of whom was Dvali) lost control in 2004 to Kibar Khalvashi; two years later Khalvashi in turn fell out with the Saakashvili administration and claims the station was illegally taken from him.
That is the basis of Khalvashi’s suit to regain control of the station. He has been joined in the action by Dvali. Station employees, however, believe that the lawsuit is an attempt by the ruling party to gain control of the country’s most popular and profitable station in advance of next year’s parliamentary elections.
The government denies that it is using the suit to quash a critical voice, calling it a commercial dispute between two parties. Nineteen non-governmental organizations disagree, saying “the judge’s decision is a direct instruction to interfere with the channel’s editorial policy and makes it possible for the temporary administrators to change the editorial policy and to dismiss the members of the TV station’s current editorial team, including the editors and journalists.”
