[6] Born in Tbilisi to a Jewish family,[7][8] Patarkatsishvili became an active member of the Komsomol, the youth wing of the Soviet Communist Party during the 1980s.

It was established as a joint venture with Logo Systems, an Italian company, which at the time was seen as pioneering in commercial relationships between East and West.

[13] By 1994, Berezovsky had secured control of ORT, the largest TV station in Russia at the time, and he installed Patarkatsishvili as First Deputy General Director.

[14] Patarkatsishvili and Berezovsky with support from Mikhail Lesin then used the station's influence to assist Boris Yeltsin to victory in the 1996 presidential election.

An unknown entity, Oil Finance Corporation (NFK), that had been created out of Menatep, a holding company started by Mikhail Khodorkovsky, won the auction.

[17] After Patarkatsishvili died, in 2012 the Sibneft privatisation was to become the subject of a high court legal battle between Chelsea football club owner Roman Abramovich and Berezovsky.

According to The Times,[18] Abramovich submitted a 53-page court defence that accused Berezovsky and Patarkatsishvili of demanding huge sums for helping him to rise from obscurity.

In an open letter to Putin published in Kommersant Berezovsky, then a Duma deputy, said that he would be obliged to vote against the president's legislative project, which was "directed toward changing the state's structure" and represented a "threat to Russia's territorial integrity and democracy.

"[27] Things came to a head in August 2000 when Berezovsky used ORT to attack Putin for his handling of the sinking of the Kursk submarine, blaming the death of 118 sailors on the Kremlin's reluctance to accept foreign help.

[29] However, in June 2001, the Russian Prosecutor General's Office charged Patarkatsishvili with organizing an attempted escape from prison of Glushkov and issued an arrest warrant for him through Interpol.

[14] Believing that he would not be given a fair trial, Patarkatsishvili refused to come in for questioning and, on July 4, 2001, he gave an interview to the Kommersant newspaper setting out his version of events in an attempt to clear his name.

He had become personally wealthier than the entire state budget and so was able to invest in business ventures and charitable projects in a scale that had been previously unimaginable to the impoverished country.

[9] However, when the Rose Revolution began in 2003 and Patarkatsishvili could see that Eduard Shevardnadze was losing his grip on power, he used his wealth to support the new opposition candidate Mikheil Saakashvili.

[33] In late 2007, he became embroiled in a political scandal after former defense minister Irakli Okruashvili on September 25, 2007, accused Mikheil Saakashvili, the President of Georgia, of planning Patarkatsishvili's assassination.

Arrested on corruption charges, however, Okruashvili retracted his accusations against the president, winning release on bail of 10 million Georgian lari (about US$6,250,000).

He also said that his earlier accusations levelled against Saakashvili were not true and were aimed at gaining political dividends for himself and Patarkatsishvili and at discrediting the President of Georgia.

Tbilisi-based Rustavi 2 TV, a channel controlled by Saakashvili's government, linked his name with several notorious murders in Russia and Georgia, including the assassination of Vlad Listyev.

Imedi produced evidence, some of it from CCT TV security cameras at the Patarkatsishvili family home which overlooked the main highway in Tbilisi, that Girgviliani's murderers were officers of the interior ministry's elite security division and were closely connected to Vano Merabishvili, the interior minister and widely seen as Saakashvili's closest political ally.

The revelations sparked widespread anger as Merabishvili's use of armed officers to crush corruption had already led to the deaths of innocent people and it was now perceived by many that the violence was being used to settle entirely personal grievances which could not be justified in any policy terms.

[38] On October 29, 2007, Patarkatsishvili publicly announced his plans to finance ten opposition parties' campaign aimed at holding early parliamentary elections in April 2008.

After the demonstration turned violent, following police attacks, on November 7, 2007, Georgia's Chief Prosecutor's Office announced that he was suspected of conspiracy to overthrow the government.

[43] On December 24 and 25, 2007, the prosecutor-general's office of Georgia released a series of audio and video recordings of the two separate meetings of the high-ranking Georgian Interior Ministry official Erekle Kodua with Patarkatsishvili and the head of his pre-election campaign Valeri Gelbakhiani.

According to the government, Patarkatsishvili was trying to bribe Kodua to take part in what the Georgian officials described as an attempted coup d'état on January 6, 2008, the next of the scheduled presidential elections.

He confirmed that he met with Kodua in London, but denied that the bribe was in connection to an alleged coup plot and claimed instead that his intention was to uncover what he said were official plans to rig the election.

He also confirmed that he offered Kodua "a huge amount of money" in exchange for defecting from the authorities allegedly to avert a possible use of force by the government against the planned January rallies.

[53] The businessman spent his last day in the City of London office of international law firm Debevoise and Plimpton, meeting his business partner[54] Boris Berezovsky, his spokesperson Tim Bell and his lawyers Lord Goldsmith KC and Richard Gibbon, as well as fellow exiles, the Russians Nikolai Glushkov and Yuli Dubov[55] From the City he left for Down Street, Mayfair, to visit Berezovsky's office,[56] and at 7.00 pm was returned to Leatherhead with his Maybach.

Most newspapers discussed Patarkatsishvili's business history, including his close ties with Boris Berezovsky, Roman Abramovich, Alexander Litvinenko, Mikheil Saakashvili and Vladimir Putin.

[66] Associated Press reported that on December 26, 2007, Patarkatsishvili said that he had obtained a tape recording of an official in his homeland's Interior Ministry asking a Chechen warlord to murder the tycoon in London.

Patarkatsishvili, living in London, was approached by members of the Saakashvili government demanding that he sell his controlling share in the dissident Imedi TV network.

Berezovsky claimed that half of Patarkatsishvili's assets belong to him under a handshake agreement that the two men made in 1995 to split all their commercial interests equally.