Former Odesa governor Mikheil Saakashvili keeps himself busy in the Netherlands by joining a professional networking agency that matches speakers and moderators with various events.
“While I’m in Europe I will make a living by lectures,” the exiled politician, and president of Georgia from 2004-2013, wrote in a Facebook post on April 7. “I hope I won’t have to give lectures for a long time, and I will use my experience not for lectures but for ousting oligarchs from power and for real reforms.”
Rotterdam-based professional speakers agency Speakers Academy has recently added Saakashvili to its diverse list of speakers, or as they are called in the agency “faculty members.” His topics range from political and economic reforms to human rights, the agency’s sales director René Warmerdam told in a written reply to the Kyiv Post.
“We received the first, non-profit request from a university in the Netherlands, but this has not been confirmed yet,” Warmerdam wrote.
The former Ukrainian governor, who served in the post from May 2015 to November 2016, fell out of favor with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and was stripped of Ukrainian citizenship in July 2017. Having forced his way into Ukraine through Poland, he helped to set up a protest campsite in front of the Ukrainian parliament, which stood through harsh winter months until police forcibly dismantled it in March.
In February, Saakashvili was arrested in a Georgian restaurant in Kyiv and deported to Poland without a court warrant, raising questions over the legitimacy of his forced expulsion. Three weeks later, the Supreme Court denied Saakashvili political asylum.
Saakashvili found temporary refuge in the Netherlands, the home country of his wife Sandra Roelofs. He continues to actively comment on Ukrainian politics and pledges to come back.
In a recent Facebook post, he posed with Ukrainian delicacies such as salo (raw pig fat), pickled mushrooms, homemade vodka and wine – brought by “a group of activists who drove all the way from western Ukraine to Amsterdam.”
This is not the first time Saakashvili has been using lectures as a backup plan. Back in December 2013, shortly after fleeing to the U.S. from Georgia under corruption charges, he joined Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy as a “senior statesmen” for the spring 2014 academic term to “conduct major addresses and lectures on European governance and other contemporary international and regional issues.”
The university ended the relationship in May 2014, even though Saakasvhili expected a renewal of his tenure, according to the New York Times.
