On April 24, the Georgian government signed a €101,480 contract with Dutch company Port Consultant Rotterdam to assess alternative versions of the Anaklia deep-sea port master plan, while the project still lacks a signed investment agreement with the Chinese-led consortium that remained the sole bidder nearly two years ago.
The decision comes after the government announced on April 8 that the cost of another portion of the Anaklia port project had been reduced by $52.5 million. Together, the cost reduction and the new review of alternative master plan options raise questions about Anaklia’s final design, investor agreement, and construction timeline, or even bigger question whether the port will be built at all.
The subsequent developments gradually weakened Anaklia’s Western dimension. Instead of moving toward construction, the project became defined by political, legal, and tender-related setbacks. The chronology shows the connection:
- In 2018, Giorgi Kvirikashvili, the prime minister under whose government the Anaklia project had gained momentum, resigned amid reported disagreements with Bidzina Ivanishvili over economic policy. Georgian Dream representatives linked the dispute to a UNICEF study, but Kvirikashvili later dismissed that explanation as unserious.
- In 2019, Mike Pompeo framed Anaklia as a strategic project that would connect Georgia to free economies and protect it from Russian and Chinese economic influence. The following reaction showed that Western context of Anaklia was unacceptable to Moscow.
- Criminal proceedings were later launched against Mamuka Khazaradze and Badri Japaridze, the project’s key Georgian stakeholders. Their assets were frozen, and civil society organizations raised concerns about the political and legal context of the case.
- In January 2020, the Georgian government terminated its agreement with the Anaklia Development Consortium, which included Georgia’s TBC Holding and the U.S.-based Conti International. This effectively ended Anaklia’s Western-backed phase.
- In May 2024, the government said that the Chinese-Singaporean consortium involving China Communications Construction Company Limited was the only bidder to submit a final proposal and would be declared the winner “in the coming days”. However, by August 2024, officials stated that no winner had yet been announced and that the consortium remained only the sole applicant,
- Nearly two years later, no investment agreement has been signed with CCCC, while the government is now reviewing alternative versions of the master plan.
- CCCC is not a neutral replacement for the previous Western-backed consortium. The company has faced U.S. criticism and restrictions, including over links between its subsidiaries and China’s military expansion in the South China Sea. In 2025, the U.S. Department of Defense listed CCCC among Chinese military companies.
Therefore, the question is political rather than technical: is the government building Anaklia in Georgia’s sovereign interest, or is it using the project to buy time, pressure Western partners, and keep uncertain a port whose original Western-backed construction was unacceptable to the Kremlin from the outset?
