MOSCOW: Arkadi "Badri" Patarkatsishvili, the exiled Georgian oligarch and opposition politician who had accused the pro-Western Georgian government of tilting toward autocracy and corruption, died unexpectedly at his home outside London, the authorities said.
Patarkatsishvili had been accused in Georgia of plotting a coup against President Mikheil Saakashvili, and faced criminal charges at the time of his death.
His friends at first said he appeared to have suffered a heart attack Tuesday night. But intrigue followed Patarkatsishvili in death as it had in life, and the British police said an autopsy would be required to be certain of the cause of death.
Boris Berezovksy, the exiled Russian oligarch and bitter foe of President Vladimir Putin of Russia, indirectly suggested the possibility of foul play, although there was no publicly known evidence as yet that pointed to that. Berezovksy was Patarkatsishvili's long-time business partner.
"I have lost my closest friend," Berezovsky said in a statement. He added, "I shall make no further comment on the circumstances of Badri's death. I shall wait for the authorities to complete their investigation."
Patarkatsishvili, 52, had long been one of Georgia's most public citizens, amassing a fortune after the fall of the Soviet Union and facing accusations at home and in Russia of corruption and white-collar crime on a monumental scale.
But by using his own money and his editorial influence at Imedi TV, a television station he owned in Georgia, he became a prominent and influential opposition leader, and even in exile emerged as a foil to Saakashvili and his government.
Saakashvili, who rose to power in a bloodless revolution in 2003, has cast himself as a democrat who is pushing post-Soviet Georgia toward the West. He had closely aligned himself with the United States.
But by Patarkatsishvili's telling, Georgia's young president was an arrogant and impulsive neophyte who squandered the revolution's potential by crushing opposition politicians, succumbing to corruption and turning the police against crowds of demonstrators last November in Tbilisi, the capital.
In that episode, the police used rubber bullets, tear gas, water cannons and batons on thousands of unarmed demonstrators. Saakashvili declared a state of emergency and masked police officers ransacked the Imedi TV station - a deep setback to Georgia's effort to portray itself as a modernizing state.
Patarkatsishvili said that the crackdown was evidence that Saakashvili had not only failed to fulfill his promises, but had become covetous of power and placed himself beyond the checks and balances of a truly democratic government.
He also suggested that Saakashvili had prepared in advance for a confrontation with the public, at the expense of investing in social programs or public works.
"Now we know what he has spent our citizens' money on," he told The New York Times, after seeing the formidable roll-out of new police equipment used against the demonstrators, many of whom were poor.
Patarkatsishvili ran unsuccessfully for president in elections in January, but his own credibility was undercut by audiotapes that appeared to show him plotting to overthrow the government by offering to pay a Georgian law enforcement official to organize a coup.
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