Boris Yeltsin shelled his own parliament with tanks in 1993. That’s the moment Paata Gamgoneishvili’s fortune really got going, and thirty-three years later, his name is attached to a Trump family real estate deal.
The project is Trump Tower Tbilisi, a planned 70-story skyscraper in Georgia’s capital. Eric Trump unveiled the rendering in May, calling it the family’s “first project in the region.”
I am so excited to share the official rendering of Trump Tower Tbilisi.
With a prime location, in the heart of Tbilisi, this tower will quickly become a landmark as the tallest building in Georgia. This marks our first project in the region and we are so excited to bring it to… pic.twitter.com/VFNuDxJnxB
— Eric Trump (@EricTrump) May 11, 2026
A joint investigation from the Daily Beast’s Substack PunchUp and The Newsground has since identified one of the Georgian partners named in that rollout, a company called Biograpi Living, as co-owned by Gamgoneishvili.
Biograpi is now backing away from the project entirely.
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That’s despite appearing directly in the Trump Organization’s own announcement and promoting the tower on its own social channels.
Gamgoneishvili’s history is precisely why the walk-back feels incomplete. He started as a Moscow trader during the Soviet collapse, and the Yeltsin standoff in 1993 gave him his real opening, before he went on to sell two Moscow malls to an Austrian fund for roughly $230 million.
Investigative outlet Bivol tied him in 2019 to a scheme accused of pulling tens of millions of dollars out of the Bulgarian arm of Russian oil company Lukoil, working alongside his longtime business partner, Russian investor Roland Isaev.
A year before that report, a television journalist who had worked with Bivol on the same story was found murdered. Authorities called it unrelated to her reporting. Bivol’s editor disagreed publicly.
Separate reporting from Czech and Bulgarian journalists placed Gamgoneishvili behind a 2018 attempt to buy stakes in Bulgaria’s power grid. His companies were found holding roughly $123 million at Sberbank, Russia’s largest state bank, with another $80 million split across two Swiss lenders. Leaked records showed him still earning interest there as recently as February 2025, three years after Sberbank landed on Western sanctions lists over the invasion of Ukraine.
The White House has drawn a firm line between the president and the deal.
“This has nothing to do with the president, whose investment holdings are held in fully discretionary accounts managed by independent third-party financial institutions,” spokeswoman Anna Kelly told the Daily Beast.
That line gets harder to hold once you look at what the Trump Organization said in April, before any of this reporting came out.
Biograpi spokesman Vasil Pkhakadze described the arrangement without any hedging at the time: “Biograpi Living is not just building projects – we are shaping the future of urban living in Georgia. With landmark developments such as Trump Tower Tbilisi, developed in partnership with the Trump Organization, we are introducing a new level of ambition, quality, and global relevance to the city.”
A separate company, Central Park Icon, was registered just weeks before that statement went out. Georgian outlet Monitori later got a considerably softer answer from Biograpi executive Tamar Gamgoneishvili, who said her company “might participate as a management company” or “might participate in sales,” a far cry from the “developed in partnership” language her own spokesman had used in the official announcement.
Featured image via Political Tribune Gallery
