Empire of Lies — The Only Thing Irakli Gilauri Ever Built

Some people simply lie. Others build empires on lies — constructions so vast that at times they overshadow truth itself. In the case of the British-Georgian Academy, the architect of that empire is Irakli Gilauri, chief executive of Georgia Capital, a company listed on the London Stock Exchange.

The British-Georgian Academy case is not a simple commercial dispute. It is a fraud, followed by a deliberate campaign to destroy those who exposed it. At the same time, it is the story of a man who operates through a carefully constructed dual identity. In London, Irakli Gilauri sells an image of Western standards and corporate governance to the board of a company listed on the stock exchange. In Georgia, his company fraudulently seized the controlling stake in the schools my husband and I founded: the British-Georgian Academy and the British International School of Tbilisi. These are the only two schools in Georgia where the Cambridge International Programme and the International Baccalaureate Diploma are taught together. We built them from nothing with our own hands over nearly two decades, and at their peak they brought together more than 1,100 students of more than fifty nationalities.

For two years now, Gilauri has been running a corporate raiding campaign aimed at seizing the schools we founded in full, trampling the fundamental terms of the deal, and destroying the reputations of their founders. Ultimately, what Gilauri intends is the destruction of the very thing that gave these schools their value.

Let us define the foundation of that deal once and for all. Irakli Gilauri did not buy our schools. He entered through fraud. The entire transaction rested on a single, unshakeable condition: the promise that he would secure the school's future by transferring the Okrokana land into the school's ownership, investing tens of millions of GEL, and building a new campus. Without that condition, there would have been no deal. Not for a controlling stake — not even for one percent.

Gilauri's conduct was not a simple breach of contract. It was the execution of a fraudulent scheme calculated from the outset. The promise, as it turned out, was never an obligation for him. He used it as bait. He turned the land promised to the school into an instrument of blackmail and used the condition of its transfer to extort money from us. In other words, it was a well-calculated extortion.

When that scheme collapsed, Gilauri declared war on reality itself. Because the facts spoke against him, Georgia Capital began fabricating false accusations to justify its past actions. The most outrageous expression of this tactic is his public claim that I — the woman who gave two decades and her own fortune to creating these schools from nothing — am now trying to destroy them. This is not merely a blatant lie. It is a deliberate attempt to falsify reality and turn the victim of his own fraud into the guilty party.

The campaign took on an increasingly repulsive form, escalating into the deliberate circulation of maliciously manipulated photographs of me and my husband.

I naively believed that there was a line a man in his position would not cross. I believed that the director of a company listed on the London Stock Exchange, accountable to a board, to investors and to a regulator, would be restrained by something — if not by principle, then at least by his own reputation. I was bitterly wrong.

And now I watch this man lie shamelessly, publicly, every single day. Such audacity is unheard of from someone with so much to lose.

Our caricatured photographs are only the visible tip of this machine of lies.

Gilauri's paid mouthpieces have branded me a woman without a homeland, a seller of my own country, a revolutionary, an extremist, a fraudster, a blackmailer, a raider of my own school — a predator preying on a school I created with my own hands and which I own.

They branded me a money-grubbing profiteer who, at the same time, refused to sell her own shares for tens of millions. They christened me the richest woman in Georgia, holder of sixty million, who “somehow” cannot pay her own lawyers. The man behind these accusations is the twenty-fifth richest person in Georgia, with a fortune of 418 million. It is he who set out to make my mythical wealth the subject of public scandal.

The accusations grow heavier and, at the same time, ever more absurd. I am now accused of attempting to dismantle the country's judicial system, of planning a coup, of sabotaging the national economy and destroying Georgia's international reputation. I am accused of waging war on the courts, of betraying my own school, of betraying my country. A woman who devoted two decades to building classrooms has apparently become a threat to the state itself.

This is part of Gilauri's raiding scheme: return every accusation made against you to your opponent, mirrored. I expose him for fraud; in response, he calls me a fraudster. I expose him for blackmail; he calls me a blackmailer. His accusations cannot withstand logic, nor are they designed to be logical, because their purpose is not to persuade but to create the illusion that two equal sides are levelling mirror-image accusations at each other. This is done with a single aim: so that the public and the state institutions, using the “impossibility” of establishing the truth as a pretext, absolve themselves of responsibility and refrain from intervening.

None of this happens on its own. Gilauri's campaign of lies is served by an entire machine built for the purpose. It begins with a PR company whose principal task is to disguise the identity of the client. Then an organisation joins in which, under the mask of public monitoring, in fact produces and distributes material commissioned by Gilauri. The output of this machine is then passed off as editorial content by paid media outlets which, for the most part, publish it without the mandatory advertising label, in direct violation of Georgian law. The backdrop to this campaign is supplied by paid “experts” and commentators who circulate hollow, pseudo-analytical assessments, and by a constantly growing network of websites and social media pages created to spread daily disinformation about me. But when even paid commentators proved insufficient, the machine took a desperate step and produced an expert who does not exist at all — a face generated by artificial intelligence and an invented biography. Every new platform serves the illusion of strength. In reality, each one is an admission that the methods before it failed completely.

But there is a red line that no dispute, however bitter, can ever justify. Gilauri's raiding campaign crossed it. They turned on my minor children too, pinning the same label on them: children without a homeland. In a complaint filed with the financial police, the education of my five children at our own school is christened embezzlement. This is the same benefit I once offered Gilauri for his own children, and which he declined. But the most shameful and immoral part of this fight does not happen in public. It takes place behind closed doors, where the subject of my children is not a legal argument but an instrument of pressure. In public, this lie is spread only by his paid mouthpieces. Gilauri himself has never had the courage to voice the accusation under his own name.

Here the absurd circle of the entire scheme closes. A school is not walls and land. Its principal capital is its name, its reputation, and the trust of the parents who place their children in our care. And all of that was created by the very woman on whose destruction Gilauri is now spending millions. He is not trying to acquire an asset by removing an unwanted partner. The chief executive of Georgia Capital is directly destroying the very thing that made this asset valuable and gave its acquisition any meaning. Every slander directed at the founder is slander directed at the school itself — published by a man who claims to own that school. No sane buyer destroys what he is trying to buy. Only someone who has lost his reason takes such a step.

Gilauri is not the sole architect of this machine of lies. He is assisted by lawyers who fabricate false narratives and by PR companies that circulate them. But the most alarming thing in this picture is the silence of the people whose direct duty is to oversee Gilauri's conduct. That leads us straight to the board of directors of Georgia Capital and to their responsibility. There are only two scenarios. Either the board was informed of the operation its own chief executive was conducting and of its financing, and considered all of it acceptable conduct for a company listed on the London Stock Exchange; or the board knew nothing about it, which in itself testifies to the complete failure of its supervisory function. A London Stock Exchange listing is meant to be a guarantee of accountability, not a shield protecting unlawful conduct.

Irakli Gilauri has indeed created something: not a school, but an entire empire built on lies. It rests on paid voices, fake platforms, and the hope that no one will ever ask after the truth. But this construction has no foundation, and it will inevitably collapse, because the truth sooner or later finds its way. Evidence will surface. Courts will issue their rulings. The paid voices will fall silent, and the invented expert will go quiet too. And in the end, someone will surely ask where the Okrokana land intended for the school went.

And when Gilauri's construction comes down, it will bring only its own architect down beneath it, because no one else is standing inside.