My son Nicholas was five years old.
In June 2025, his class at the British International School of Tbilisi – the school my husband and I founded and built – held its Foundation graduation. Nicholas did not attend his own graduation. He could not. The people occupying our school on behalf of Georgia Capital and its CEO Irakli Gilauri had banned both of his parents from entering the campus. What five-year-old walks into his own graduation alone, without his mother or father there to watch? So he stayed home. A child was denied the celebration he had earned, at the school his own parents created.
Two months later, in August 2025, it was the first day of school. Nicholas was still five. Again, we were barred from the campus. He walked in – the only child without a parent beside him. Soon after, he stopped going to school altogether. He could not understand why he was alone when every other child had their family there. Eventually we were forced to leave the country and the school that had been his home since the day he was born, and his sister Anastasia’s home since the day she was born.
I want to tell you who else was there on those days.
Archil Gachechiladze – CEO of Bank of Georgia – has a child in the same year as my son. His family attended the Foundation graduation. His family was there on the first day of school. His children celebrated every milestone that mine were denied, at the very school my children were forced out of.
And here is what matters most: Archil Gachechiladze knew.
On 19 June 2025, I wrote to the parents of my son’s class – Archil Gachechiladze among the named recipients – and told them plainly that my five-year-old was being excluded from his own graduation because his parents had been unlawfully banned from the school we built. I asked them directly:
“How can you truly celebrate, knowing that one child, Nicholas, has been deliberately and unjustly denied the chance to celebrate this milestone he rightfully earned?”
Archil Gachechiladze was directly informed. He did not reply. His family attended the graduation. My son stayed home.
But Archil Gachechiladze did not merely stay silent. He acted.
When Georgian media first reported what was being done to our family and our school, the public began to learn the truth. Then the coverage abruptly stopped. Outlet after outlet told us the same thing, and they were not vague about it: they had entered into “contracts” with Bank of Georgia and could no longer cover our story. Pieces already published were not followed up. The reporting simply went quiet.
This is what the financial power of a bank can do to a country’s press. Bank of Georgia’s commercial relationships with the media were being used – on the explicit account of the journalists themselves – to shut down reporting on a dispute involving the bank’s own CEO and Georgia Capital, its largest shareholder. The effect was unmistakable: what was done to four children, and to the school their parents built, was kept from the public. He did not merely look away from the abuse of children – his bank’s money kept the rest of the country from looking at it too.
And this was no disinterested outsider. Bank of Georgia is a subsidiary of Lion Finance Group PLC – a UK-registered, London-headquartered company listed on the London Stock Exchange, promoted into the FTSE 100 in March 2026. The largest single shareholder in that group is Georgia Capital PLC – the very company that seized my school – holding roughly 14.9% as of its most recent disclosure, and itself a London-registered, London-listed company. The man whose bank’s money buried this story runs a group whose largest owner is the company behind the seizure. This was not a bystander protecting the public from a scandal. It was a business partner protecting his own.
Every choice Archil Gachechiladze made here, he made freely. He was informed, in writing, that a five-year-old was being punished for his parents’ refusal to surrender to corporate raiding. He could have said one word. Instead he said nothing to me – and his bank’s money made sure no one else could say anything either. That is not neutrality. That is complicity, bought and paid for.
A man who turns a blind eye to the abuse of children is himself an abuser.
Today, Irakli Gilauri and Archil Gachechiladze send their children to the school my husband and I built. Their children keep the classrooms, the celebrations and the community that ours were forced to leave. In June 2025, my five-year-old son missed his graduation because his parents were barred from the school they founded. Archil Gachechiladze was informed. His own family attended. A year later, our family had left Georgia. Theirs remained.
This August, Archil Gachechiladze stood with his children as they began the new school year at my school – the one his partners took from me – while my children started over as strangers in a foreign country, far from the only home they had ever known.
My son lost his school. Their children kept the one taken from him.
I will recover what was taken from us. And I will see that it is known who was responsible – not only for what was done to our schools, but for what was done to the children who called them home.
— Natia Janashia, Founder, British International School of Tbilisi and British-Georgian Academy