Let me concede the point most coverage of Trump Tower Tbilisi has been built on, because the facts have moved past it. The tower is not rising on a parcel still held by Bidzina Ivanishvili’s foundation. Cartu — the fund tied to his family — sold it in July, and on Sept. 15, a spokesperson confirmed to the Wall Street Journal that the final payment had been made.
That answers the question everyone has been asking: Who owns the ground under the tower? It leaves untouched the question almost no one has asked: how that ground came to be worth $85 million in the first place.
Oct. 5, 2020
Twenty-six days before Georgia’s parliamentary elections, on Oct. 5, 2020, Mayor Kakha Kaladze held a briefing to announce a gift. By the decision of Bidzina Ivanishvili and his family, he said, the territory of the former Tbilisi hippodrome would be transferred to the municipality. A Central Park would be built there for the people of Tbilisi. City Hall expressed its gratitude.
Ivanishvili’s company had bought roughly 50 hectares of that hippodrome in 2009. He said so himself at a 2013 press conference, and gave both the price and the purpose: he had paid $52 million, and the land had been acquired for him in order to build a technological university.
No technological university was ever built.
Radio Free Europe reported what the briefing did not mention: not all of the land was given away. The greenest, most valuable portion — roughly eight hectares — stayed in his ownership. A Georgian outlet put it more bluntly the next day: Ivanishvili gave the city the economically less profitable part of the hippodrome.
The park that resulted covers 36 hectares. Five years later, it is still unfinished.
DON JR. DIDN’T BREAK THE LAW IN THE BAHAMAS. HE DID SOMETHING MUCH DUMBER
Now follow the eight hectares he kept.
In October 2023, Georgia’s TV Pirveli reported that the Cartu fund had transferred 80,000 square metres of the hippodrome — the greenest zone, the paper specified — to Central Park Avenue, a company belonging to the Pkhakadze family, for $85 million. Eighty thousand square meters is eight hectares. It is the same land.
So: $52 million for fifty hectares in 2009. Thirty-six given to the city in 2020. The eight he kept sold for $85 million in 2023.
He sold eight hectares for more than he had paid for fifty.
TV Pirveli added one more observation from researchers tracking the oligarch’s transactions at the time: they believed he had begun converting real estate into cash in anticipation of sanctions. The U.S. Treasury designated him fourteen months later.
Two things about Kaladze, who announced the gift. On Dec. 5, 2024, Ukraine sanctioned 19 Georgian figures — Ivanishvili, Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze, and Kaladze among them — for selling out the interests of Georgia. And asked on air in June about his City Hall’s dealings with Archi Group, one of the tower’s developers, Kaladze confirmed the relationship, calling Archi’s founder Ilia Tsulaia his childhood friend and the godfather of his child.
The permits for this tower are issued by a municipality whose mayor announced the gift, is sanctioned by Ukraine, and is godfather to the developer’s child.
What the gift actually did
Set aside intent, which I cannot establish and will not claim. Look only at the mechanism, which works the same regardless of what anyone meant.
A large public park is among the most powerful amenities for raising the value of the land around it. Eric Trump made the comparison himself at the Sept. 15 launch, telling the room that just as Trump Tower sits by Central Park in New York, this one will rise beside Tbilisi’s new central park. He is right about the parallel. It is worth following further than he took it.
The city took on the park. The family kept the frontage. Public money now improves an amenity that raises the value of the private land facing it, on which a consortium is building what the prime minister described as a 62-floor, 282-metre tower carrying the name of a sitting American president.
Civil.ge described the site precisely on Sept. 15: The project sits in the area adjacent to Tbilisi’s under-construction Central Park.
Adjacent. A Georgian news agency put the business model in one word, and the Washington debate has gone straight past it.
Why sanctions cannot see this
The U.S. Treasury designated Ivanishvili on Dece. 27, 2024, under Executive Order 14024 — the authority built for Russia — for undermining Georgia’s democracy and its Euro-Atlantic future for the benefit of the Russian Federation. That designation is not a relic of the previous administration: President Donald Trump continued the underlying national emergency in April 2025 and again in March 2026.
What makes the tower legally possible is a second document issued the same day. General License 116 authorizes Americans to transact with any entity in which Ivanishvili holds, directly or indirectly, a 50% or greater interest, provided the entity is not itself on the SDN list. The man is frozen. The empire is licensed.
But sanctions architecture is transactional. It asks who paid whom, through which bank, for what. No regime measures a gift made four years before a designation existed, or what a public park does to the private land facing it. There is no filing for adjacency and no violation when it occurs.
An oligarch who wanted to convert an American president’s name into an appreciating asset would not need to evade anything — only to give a city a park, keep the frontage, and sell one parcel at a fair price. Nothing described here, by itself, establishes a violation of law, and most of these transactions predate the sanctions. That is the point: the structure produces the same result whether or not anyone designed it to.
The names, precisely
The buyers are also the builders. Central Park Avenue, which bought the parcel, belongs to the Pkhakadze family; the same family’s Biograpi Living is named among the tower’s development partners.
Two of the businessmen in the project’s own announcement photograph — Ilia Tsulaia of Archi Group, a former ruling-party MP, and Soso Pkhakadze of Wissol — appear on a January 2025 letter from members of Congress to then-incoming Secretary of State Marco Rubio naming roughly two dozen figures in Ivanishvili’s network as sanctions candidates. So do Kobakhidze and Kaladze, both of whom attended the launch.
None of the consortium’s shareholders has been sanctioned by anyone. A name on a proposal is not a designation, and attending a building launch is not wrongdoing. I say that plainly, because the distinction is the whole difference between analysis and smear.
Leverage is not a transaction
Twelve years in Georgia’s security services working against Russian intelligence operations leaves you with one habit: stop asking what is prohibited and start asking what is durable.
A sale ends when it closes. A neighbor does not end. For as long as that tower stands, the family whose patriarch Treasury designated will own land around it, hold the position the public park was built to enhance, and benefit from every dollar the Trump name adds to the district. No transaction occurs. Nothing can be licensed or blocked. It is not a payment. It is a position.
GEORGIA IS DEMOLISHING ITS WESTERN FUTURE — ONE LANDMARK AT A TIME
I put this to the Trump Organization privately in July, before any of it was public, and received no reply. The request has not changed, and it is still not an accusation. Somebody should draw a map of who owns the land within a kilometer of that tower, mark which parcels the city was given and which were kept, and look at it.
It is an afternoon’s work, and as far as I can tell no one has done it.
Emzari Gelashvili is a former senior Georgian counterintelligence officer and a former member of the Parliament of Georgia. He is a veteran of the 2008 Russia-Georgia war.