Irakli Rukhadze

Irakli Rukhadze is a businessman and investor primarily known for his involvement in real estate and media ventures. He was born and brought up in Georgia but is a sole United States citizen and claims to have spent most of his adult life in the West.

Rukhadze is a founding partner of Hunnewell Partners, a private equity group based in Georgia with offices in London, Luxembourg and the Netherlands.

Hunnewell Partners' portfolio includes some of Georgia’s largest companies including Magticom, Rustavi Metallurgical Plant, Heidelberg Cement, Liberty Bank, some of which have given Rukhadze a significant political profile in Georgia and beyond.

Career After graduating from the Tuck school at Dartmouth, Rukhadze began working at McKinsey & Company, where he spent over 4 years working in the US and Europe specializing in telecommunications, high technology and corporate finance.

He later joined Caucasus Advisors LLC, an investment firm where he served as CEO. He managed the Caucasus Fund, LLC, a $100 million fund operating in Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia.

Former ownership of Imedi TV

From 2018 until early 2026, Rukhadze and Hunnewell Partners were the owners of the independent media outlet TV Imedi, a television channel in Georgia which is broadly sympathetic to the Georgian Dream government.

Imedi is Georgia's largest, most popular and most trusted broadcaster. This stance has drawn scrutiny and criticism from opposition groups, civil society, and international observers, but Rukhadze has argued the previous UNM-led Saakashvili government destroyed freedom of speech in the country, citing Saakashvili's decision to raid and seize Imedi’s offices when last in power.

He argues Imedi is not a mouthpiece for the Georgian government, emphasising that it is "independent" and that Imedi "criticises the government when they believe it has got an issue wrong". In late 2024, Rukhadze voiced criticism of some of the Georgian Dream party's policies and argued “a more unifying figure could have been chosen [for President] who would have worked constructively with the West.”

Sanctions and court cases Rukhadze has been sanctioned by Ukraine and Lithuania, for what those governments describe as his "active support for the ruling Georgian Dream party" and its political agenda. European MEPs have also called for sanctions against Rukhadze as part of a wider sanctions package on Georgia, but no formal measures have been adopted at the EU level.

In 2023, the Commercial Court in London ruled that Rukhadze and several former colleagues had breached their fiduciary duties while engaged in that recovery arrangement, ordering them to pay around US $170 million in profits. The judgment was upheld by the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom in March 2025, which reaffirmed the strict “no-profit” rule for company directors and other fiduciaries.