Bidzina Ivanishvili, the billionaire founder and honorary chairman of Georgian Dream, secured a decisive victory in his protracted legal confrontation with Credit Suisse. On November 24, the Judicial Committee of the UK Privy Council—the final court of appeal for Bermuda—confirmed a 2022 ruling by the Bermuda Supreme Court, which held Credit Suisse Life Ltd. liable for defrauding him of USD 607 million.

Credit Suisse had challenged the Bermuda judgment in 2024, but the Privy Council rejected the appeal in its entirety, with the sole exception of reviewing the timeline used to calculate damages.

The case originates from the actions of former Credit Suisse adviser Patrice Lescaudron, who orchestrated a large-scale fraud scheme targeting Ivanishvili and several other clients. Ivanishvili’s lawyers have long maintained that the misconduct could not have occurred without broader knowledge or negligence within the bank.

Despite the legal win, Ivanishvili does not expect to recover the funds. In a November 20 Facebook post, his attorney, Temo Tsikvadze, argued that U.S. sanctions imposed on Ivanishvili make compensation unlikely. He also accused American institutions of engaging in “politically motivated persecution” and “racketeering.”

Ivanishvili’s public complaints about difficulties accessing his Swiss-based assets date back to spring 2022—shortly after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. This was nearly two years before Washington sanctioned those who had adopted a more confrontational political stance. This group then drove the initial, ultimately withdrawn version of the 2023 foreign agents law, and the resulting controversy—labelled by Ivanishvili’s allies as “de facto sanctions”—played a significant role in the decline of U.S.–Georgia relations.

In his latest comments, Tsikvadze also alleged that the Swiss bank has frozen the accounts of Ivanishvili’s family members. “If the bank claims U.S. sanctions—however illogically—as justification for withholding Mr. Ivanishvili’s funds, it can offer no explanation at all for seizing the assets of his wife and children,” Tsikvadze stated.

The ruling reads: “In September 2015 Mr Ivanishvili discovered that his relationship manager at the Bank, Mr Patrice Lescaudron, had been dealing fraudulently with the policy assets. As established in these proceedings, Mr Lescaudron’s fraudulent conduct included misappropriating assets, transferring assets from the policy accounts to those of unrelated clients, transferring assets into the policy accounts at an overvalue to hide losses of those unrelated clients, and enriching himself by making investments of policy assets on which he received secret commissions. Following criminal complaints by Mr Ivanishvili, the Bank and others, Mr Lescaudron was prosecuted in Switzerland. In February 2018 he was convicted of offences of fraud, mismanagement, aggravated mismanagement and forgery and was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment. He later committed suicide.”