The public broadcaster, which has recently been seen as taking a turn towards serious journalistic standards and ethics, looks as though it has returned to being nothing more than a propaganda tool of the Saakashvili regime after it failed to report yesterday's disturbances in central Tbilisi.

The two other national channels - Rustavi 2 and Imedi - also ignored the events: which saw large-scale scuffling outside the parliament, the arrest of opposition activists and the escape from cutody of one of the arrested. But no one seriously expects these channels to do anything than follow the orders of the regime.

The public broadcaster, however, has recently taken advice from the BBC on how to run a news room and has seen non-partisan figures commited to quality journalism join its governing board (which, however, has no editorial role). During the May elections it was the public broadcaster - as opposed to the two national commercial channels - that hosted a debate between mayoral candidates which for the first time put the ruling party on the same footing as the opposition.

Now the elections are over and many western observers have given the conclusion Saakashvili wanted - that he may not be perfect but he's cleaning up his act - the signs are that the regime is once more persuing a path of radicalisation: partly driven by its dire financial straits and the collapse of its libertarian vision of Georgia's future as the country depends on western grants and loans.

Business investors privately say that extortion in the form of raids bty the tax police have increased, refugees in Tbilis are being evicted and faced with a choice between destitution in the capital or merely poverty in the countryside as the regime looks to privatise their former homes and, as yesterday's events suggest, the screw of political repression is being once more slowly tightened.

The Saakashvili regime has repeatedly proved itself to be its own worst enemy and plainly hasn't even learnt the lesson that turning TV stations into propaganda outlets in the long term will only serve to undermine social trust and respect for democracy and the rule of law.

Mikheil Saakashvili's economic plans suffered a blow yesterday when his favouite foreign investor - the Ras Al Khaimah Investment Agency (RAKIA) - announced it had no plans to make any further purchases in Georgia and would concentrate future investment in its home territory.

Announcing plans to privatise their major Georgia asset, the port of Poti, RAKIA's chief executive Khater Massaad said: "We have clear instructions not to invest any more overseas and to invest only locally."

The sovereign wealth fund of the tiny absolute Gulf monarchy of Ras Al Khaimah, RAKIA has done well out of Saakashvili's rule - getting access to assets, often seized from those Saakashvili regarded as political enemies, at low or zero cost. including the Mtsatsminda amusement park and the Imedi TV station: both seized from the family Badri Patarkatsishvili, who ran against Saakashvili in the 2008 presidential polls.

But latterly there have been signs that RAKIA are wary of further entanglement in the political mess caused by Saakashvili's expropriations: earlier this year they denied having anything to do with Imedi despite a year going by since the Georgian media and the president's office confirming they had bought the station off Saakashvili's proxy, Joseph Kay. The press conference announcing the station's purchase even featured a man, named as Mark Monem (pictured, left), whom multiple witnesses have subsequently confirmed to georgiamediacentre.com as an employee at RAKIA's Georgian subsidiary, Rakeen.

And in the last year the domestic political situation in Ras Al Khaimah has become sticky and the Gulf states and Georgia alike have suffered consequences from the global economic downturn: Mtatsminda park is littered with uncompleted rides and building sites on which nobody works (see picture, right) including what appears to be a half-built hotel.

Foreign investment is vital for Georgia given its large trade deficit: with capital inflows the country faces the prospect of big public spending cuts, a currency devaluation, higher interest rates and increased inflation.

Giorgi Targamadze, leader of the Christian Democrats, is something of a Georgian enigma.

Formerly the chief spokesman for the Adjaran government when that body was under the grip of the regional strongman Aslan Abashidze, his job then was to provide some sort of fig leaf of respectability to an open corrupt and thuggish regime.
 

He got out of that one before the roof caved in and a fter a brief parliamentary career next came to public prominence as the main face Imedi TV when that station increasingly became the vehicle that exposed the brutality and lies behind the Saakashvili regime. He was the man who was on air as that station died live on air under the assault of Georgian special forces on 7 November 2007.
 

His behaviour in the weeks that followed left many embittered – essentially he has been accused of being all too willing to assent to the Saakashvili’s regime destruction of the station’s integrity after international pressure forced the government to let it go back on air: unable to destroy the station by force from without, Saakashvili’s cronies found themselves an ally on the inside say Targamadze’s enemies.
 

Some mutter that Targamadze’s Adjaran past makes him particularly vulnerable to a state security service more than happy to store up past misdemeanours for future use against potential enemies.
 

One thing is clear though – many of Imedi’s former journalists remain loyal to him, with former star interviewer Inga Grigolia being the most famous of those who followed him when he returned to politics through the founding of the Christian Democrats.
 

That party’s behaviour since 2007 has been an echo of Targamadze’s wider career: one minute attacking the regime for its complicity in shooting down innocent people, the next seeming to side with Saakashvili – and being duly rewarded with dollops of coverage on the state controlled media – in attacking opposition figures as agents of Russia (notably while forming a political alliance with parties formerly in Vladimir Putin’s orbit).
 

The Christian Democrats, though, have won consistent praise – in private – from western diplomats, who see Targamadze not as a skilled performer and political chameleon but as a reformed man serious about building a national party.
 

In Tbilisi (pictured) his party has struggled but outside the capital it has done better – coming second in the national vote in the 30 May election: partly a reflection of being willing to spread its resources more thinly and partly because Targamadze made no effort to win power anywhere but did try to win something everywhere: the very opposite of Irakli Alasania’s approach.
 

Today the Georgian press rumour (and it is just a rumour) that Alasania and Targamadze may be about to join forces. These sorts of stories often lead nowhere and can even have been planted by enemies anxious to stir up trouble.
 

But let us just examine the issues here in any case.
 

In one dimension this makes perfect sense: both leaders say Georgia needs change but that the change should come from the ballot box and not the street. Both have rejected the idea that the opposition should pose as the deal makers with the Kremlin, both have expressed concerns about civil and human rights under Saakashvili while expressing no desire to return to the status quo ante the Rose Revolution of 2003.
 

But there are also considerable draw-backs. It’s not just Targamadze’s Adjaran past that suggests he is the supreme opportunist, but his constant zig sagging in and out of Saakashvili’s orbit today. His party is also less than committed to Alasania’s pro-western vision: rarely talking of NATO and advocating a protectionist economic approach that would make integration with the EU an impossibility.
 

More seriously it would drive a yet bigger wedge between Alasania (pictured, right) and what were until just a few weeks ago his key allies in the Republicans, New Rights and Way of Georgia. They are unlikely to see Targamadze as anything but a stooge of Saakashvili.
 

But Alasania’s calculation may be that the doubling of the electoral base of the “reformist” wing that an alliance with the Christian Democrats will bring makes the costs of the deal worth paying.

Foreign investors in Georgia have been warned that little noticed changes in Georgian law mean that foreign investors in dispute with the Georgian state might have to rely on the notoriously biased and subservient Georgian domestic courts and could lose the right to go to international arbitration.

Writing in "Investment Arbitration Reporter" international arbitration expert Luke Eric Peterson states:

In a little-noticed development last year, the Republic of Georgia passed a noteworthy series of amendments to the country’s foreign investment statute...

The July 2009 amendments also altered the law’s expropriation clause which had contained a reference to disputes over expropriation and compensation being eligible for resolution under Article 16. The revised law now stipulates that such disputes can be heard in Georgian courts, “unless otherwise provided by agreement between parties or international treaties of Georgia.”
 

Peterson states that the Georgian authorities say that there is no reason to be alarmed by the law as Georgia has signed a number of bilateral investment protection treaties that would shield foreign investors from having to rely on Georgia's courts. But that only begs the question of why it was felt necessary to stipulate that the domestic courts, and not international arbitration courts, should take the central role.

Only last week reports emerged that the Georgian authorities wanted to seriously restrict access to information about the Georgian state's participation in international courts, including arbitration courts. Georgia has one case outstanding in the international arbitration courts - with the family of the late Badri Patarkatsishvili who are claiming compensation for the state's seizure of the Imedi TV station and the long lease on Tbilisi's Mtatsminda (sacred mountain) amusement park (see picture) on or immediately after the 7 November 2007 declaration of a state of emergency by the Saakashvili regime.

That case is due to come before the UN's arbitration tribunal in December this year, writes Peterson.

Just a few days after he sacked is economy minister - despite repeated claims of Georgia's economic recovery - the president has now first publicly humiliated and now sacked the head of the tourism administration: despite a year of ever more hyperbolic claims for Georgia's tourism successes.

On Saturday night the president told Imedi TV's "Special Reportage" that Zaal Abazadze, the head of te tourism department, could not answer his questions about the number of tourists visiting the country.

Last night Zaal Abazadze resigned.

Zaal Abazadze has been in post for barely nine months and had - in the eyes of the regime - an excellent political pedigree, having worked for the conservative "Washington Times" newspaper.