TBILISI, DFWatch – A journalist working for the Georgian online television Presage.tv has left her job, saying businessman Bidzina Ivanishvili pressured her to write laudatory stories about him.

“I left the Pressatv.ge, which Misha [President Mikheil Saakashvili] couldn’t destroy but Bidzina [Ivanishvili] has put it in his pocket,” Rusudan Mumladze wrote on her Facebook page yesterday.

“When you are told that we are given the financing we had been dreaming of, and this is not the time for objectivity, and it doesn’t fit to us to write anything but laudation about this person, what can a journalist do?” she writes, noting that this is happening on the anniversary of pressage.tv freeing itself from the president’s control.

“Mr. Bidzina, do you think that it was my Georgian Dream, the Journalist’s dream?” she appeals to Mr Ivanishvili.

She says that she has been a journalist for a long time, and no one has ever dared ‘cut down’ her material.

“That’s how the money-friendship is destroyed. I don’t need the Georgian Dream. Misha has already made such a dream come true.”

Mumladze also works at the independent media unity Obiektivi.