Kote Ioseliani, the husband of Georgia’s United National Movement (UNM) opposition party chair, Tina Bokuchava, was reportedly abducted in Tbilisi on June 8 and forced to release a video publicly apologising to Uta Ivanishvili, son of the billionaire founder of Georgia’s ruling party, Bidzina Ivanishvili.

During a press briefing on June 9, Bokuchava described how her husband was ambushed and forced into a car by several masked individuals outside the family’s residence in the Vake district of Tbilisi.

The politician stated that her husband was blindfolded, his hands tied and driven to an unknown building where he was held overnight and denied access to his phone.

Bokuchava also stated that her husband’s kidnappers threatened to harm their children, giving details of the school and nursery attended by their 10-year-old son and two-year-old twins.

MPs from the ruling Georgian Dream (GD) party rejected Bokuchava’s allegations, dismissing her description of what happened to her husband as “nonsense, lies and fairy tales”, as reported by InterpressNews.

In comments to a journalist in 2018, Ioseliani insinuated Uta Ivanishvili had had an affair with former Georgian prime minister Mamuka Bakhtadze.

Several days later, Ioseliani apologised for “acting unethically” and “hurting anyone’s feelings”.

On the morning of June 8 shortly after his kidnapping, Ioseliani uploaded a minute-long video to his Facebook page in which he apologised again for his claims seven years ago regarding Uta Ivanishvili’s sexuality.

In the clip, Ioseliani said that he was “genuinely” sorry, and that his comments in 2018 had not been based on any real fact.

The video immediately sparked backlash, with GD critics insisting the video had not been filmed voluntarily and pointing to the connection between Ioseliani’s intimidation and the publication of the apology.

At the June 9 briefing, Bokuchava stressed that her husband’s kidnapping was not really linked to his remarks about Uta Ivanishvili, but aimed at intimidating her.

“A statement about Uta Ivanishvili seven years ago, for which Kote [Isoleliani] had already publicly apologised a few days after making it, cannot be the real reason for his violent abduction yesterday. This is only a pretext… The real goal is to intimidate and silence me,” the UNM chair stated.

“I am not afraid. I will not stay silent,” Bokuchava continued, adding that she would continue her “fight to dismantle [GD’s] violent, treacherous regime”.

On June 9, Bokuchava announced that both she and her husband had been summoned for questioning before Georgia’s interior ministry, as reported by InterpressNews.

Several UNM members, including the party’s founder and honorary chair, Georgia’s imprisoned ex-president Mikheil Saakashvili, have compared the abduction and intimidation tactics used against Ioseliani to those deployed against dissenters in Ramzan Kadyrov’s Chechnya.

The incumbent Georgian Dream government has ramped up a campaign of repression in recent months in an attempt to fully outlaw its political opponents.

Two opposition leaders and members of the former UNM government – Zurab Girchi Japaridze and Mika Melia – are currently in pre-trial detention following their refusal to appear before GD’s parliamentary commission tasked with probing the activities of the former-ruling UNM.

Other opposition leaders who ignored their commission summons – for example Giorgi Vashadze, leader of the UNM-Unity coalition alongside Bokuchava – predict that their arrest is imminent.