Georgian billionaire died of ‘natural causes’

Conspiracy theorists who believed that the death in Surrey on Tuesday of an exiled Georgian billionaire was 'another Litvinenko-style murder' may be proved wrong. According to initial post-mortem tests, it looks as though Badri Patarkatsishvili died from natural causes, probably a heart attack, according to Surrey police.

Toxicology tests are yet to be carried out on the 52-year-old tycoon but these will take a number of weeks.

Patarkatsishvili was a sworn enemy of Georgia's president, Mikhail Saakashvili, and had recently admitted to being afraid of an assassination attempt. He had been living in self-imposed exile at his mansion in Leatherhead ever since Georgian authorities accused him of plotting a coup against President Saakashvili last year.

Georgian authorities blamed Patarkatsishvili, and a television station he owned, for stirring mass protests against the president on the streets of the capital Tiblisi in November. The protests were crushed by riot police and the TV station and other assets were seized.

In January, Patarkatsishvili ran against Saakashvili in Georgia's presidential election. But he could not return to Geoirgia to campaign for fear of arrest, and won only seven per cent of the votes.

The fact that, like the late Russian agent Alexander Litvinenko, Patarkatsishvili was a friend of the exiled Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky, served to fuel the theory that he may have been killed. ·