Vera Kobalia

Vera Kobalia (born 24 August 1981) is a Georgian politician who has served in the Cabinet of Georgia as the country's Minister of Economy and Sustainable Development from 2 July 2010 to 25 October 2012.

Early life Kobalia was born in 1981 in Sukhumi in the disputed Georgian region of Abkhazia. In 1996, her family emigrated to Canada because of the instability brought about by the Georgian–Abkhazian conflict. She attended King George Secondary School, and subsequently the British Columbia Institute of Technology in Burnaby, British Columbia, where in 2004 she graduated with a degree in business administration and informational technologies. and she vowed to reorganize her department under the slogan "no nepotism" to help purge institutional corruption in government.

Kobalia's appointment prompted skepticism because of Kobalia's young age (she was only 28 at the time of her appointment) and lack of political experience. She first came to President Saakashvili's attention four months before her appointment when a delegation of Vancouver's Georgian community met with the president while he was in town for the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver. Nodar Javakhishvili, the former head of the Georgian National Bank, was quoted as saying that Kobalia had been appointed "without having either the necessary education or any experience whatsoever." Other pundits have noted that President Saakashvili, himself only 36 when he came to power, had a habit of appointing young ministers and openly claimed that pulling the younger generation into positions of power was a deliberate strategy to build a new Georgia free from the legacy of Soviet domination.