"Do you know Gilbert & George?" he says standing by a large picture by the London artists in his glass headquarters-cum-home overlooking Tbilisi.
AFTER visiting Ukraine, Poland Armenia and Azerbaijan over the past thee days, Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State, for the first time in her life arrived in Georgia's capital Tbilisi.
This involves sending a flood of bogus requests to an internet server, so that it is overwhelmed by the demand and becomes unusable.One website, called StopGeorgia, provided a utility called DoSHTTP, plus a handy list of target websites, including those of Georgian government agencies and the British and American embassies in the capital, Tbilisi.
It is commonplace in Tbilisi to stay up drinking and eating until one or two in the morning.
Tensions have risen as Tbilisi prosecutors have begun probing money-laundering by companies linked to Mr Abashidze's relatives, many of whom hold high government posts in the region.
Now 79, Yevgeny lived for some years in Tbilisi, the Georgian capital, a short drive from Gori, Stalin's birthplace.
Georgia has had a turbulent post-Soviet experience, to put it mildly, beset by separatist conflicts in two territories, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, and riven by a civil war that left the centre of the capital, Tbilisi, in ruins.
A score of UNM bigwigs have been arrested, including a former defence and interior minister, the chief of the general staff and the vice-mayor of Tbilisi.
The result is an "NGO-cracy", in which Tbilisi-based intellectuals and experts have more interaction "with embassies and Western foundations" than with ordinary citizens.
According to two Tbilisi-based economists, "Georgia rushed into this agreement without a careful "in-house" analysis of the deal it is getting into".
American lobbying proved crucial to the success of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline that runs from Azerbaijan to Turkey's Mediterranean coast, which opened in 2005.
