A Georgian-born former Ukrainian deputy prosecutor, David Sakvarelidze, announced plans on May 24 to launch a new political party in Ukraine, almost two months after he was fired from his position.
Sakvarelidze is regarded as a young reformer, and pledges the new organization will be Ukraine’s first legitimate political party. Concrete plans to launch the party have yet to materialize, but Sakvarelidze — loyal to Odessa governor and former Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili — said he is in active consultation with “all healthy parties and civil society groups.”
“It will be the first precedent of a healthy political party, which will not be an oligarch project, which won’t be the project of a president doomed to fail and hinder the development of the state,” he said, the Interfax-Ukraine news agency reported.
Sakvarelidze stressed that the party will be built from scratch, not simply created by renaming an existing party. The party’s platform, he said, will focus on developing conditions for small and medium businesses. Funding for the party will be transparent, he promised, to help prevent the movement from being hijacked by dirty money.
One of the party’s leading ideological thinkers will be Saakashvili — currently serving as the head of the Odessa regional administration. Sakvarelidze has ties to Saakashvili, under whom he served as the General Prosecutor of Odessa.
Sakvarelidze was fired by former Ukrainian chief prosecutor Viktor Shokin on March 29, just hours before the Ukrainian parliament caved under pressure from international donors and voted to remove Shokin, accused of corruption, from his post.
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