Engineer Dashti Shukri, Executive Manager for Rekan Group Georgia LTD

In 2015, Rekan Group for Investment and Development (an Iraqi nationality company from Kurdistan), started its first overseas project in Batumi city. The Group create a new company in Georgia under the name of Rekan Group-Georgia LTD in 2014, after which it began studying Georgian investment laws and checking the investment environment with plans to start investing in Georgia. The result led the company to choose Batumi city for its first project. In December 2014, the company signed an investment agreement with the Ministry of Economy in Adjara to invest $50 million in a multi-complex project in Batumi city named Batumi View. The project will include four buildings with a hotel, 60 commercial shops and more than 870 residential apartments.

In 2015, Mr. Shukri moved from Iraq to Georgia and was designated the Executive Manager for Rekan Group. He got his resident permit and began communicating with official government bodies to present the project design and get approval and a license. Building a good relationship with the government was one of his major responsibilities, ensuring the company and Batumi View work within Georgian regulations.

In 2020, during the COVID-19 crisis, with air borders closed, Mr Shukri successfully represented his company to, with the support of Adjara government, the Georgian Embassy in Amman, and the Kurdistan government, open Iraqi airspace to help Georgian citizens stranded in Kurdistan to return home.

Mr Shukri built his experiences after graduating from a civil engineering college in Baghdad, Iraq. Until 2003, he worked in many fields, as a supervising engineer, IT specialist, admiration and trading. After 2003, he started to work with the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) as Project Manager and Advisor to the Ministry of Labor and Social Affair in Iraq. He was responsible for facilities analysis, developing tenders, drafting agreements, and rehabilitation of more than 50 vocational training centers for the Ministry. He managed teams of Iraqi engineers tasked with the rehabilitation of facilities and also participated in procurement committees with other technical staff to implement transparent and accountable procurement procedures and to develop a significant Information Technology program with IOM supervision. Toward the end of his tenure, he worked as technical advisor to the Minister for all technical and some administrative work.

After that, he moved to work with a USAID-funded project program as the National Anti-Corruption Program Coordinator in Iraq for ICSP, designed to strengthen the capacity and effectiveness of Iraqi civil society organizations (CSOs). His responsibilities included coordinating the work of about 25 local staff in four regional offices. He managed, trained, and provided technical assistance and programmatic guidance to these staff. In 2004, he became the Transparency International (TI) liaison in Iraq, where he was responsible for sending several Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) to participate in international activities and to support Iraqi CSOs to build a good relationship with TI and to get training from them. He joined many TI workshops in Kuwait, Amman, Lebanon and Berlin. He represented ICSP and CSOs in a TI Conference about Corruption in Economic Perspective. In November 2005, he represented Iraq alongside 90 countries at the Transparency International Annual Membership Meeting in Berlin (for TI Annual meeting for TI-Chapters and contacts). Moreover, in 2005 he participated in writing the draft Platform for Action that was submitted in the Forum of Future for G8-BMENA Civil Society Dialogue, which was held in Bahrain for G8-BMENA.

After 2006, Mr Shukri started working with Rekan Group for Investment and Development. Rekan Group is a group of companies based in Kurdistan, specialized in investing in many fields of projects, among them real-state, housing, commercial centers (malls), and many others. The capital of these projects reached $400 Million. He started as general manager and business developing manager for group projects inside and outside Iraq. He was responsible for building and creating all needed documents, like feasibility studies, designing projects documents with expert engineers to get investment licenses. He was responsible for controlling the goods and negotiations with local and international suppliers to ensure good results. 200 local employees and 20 specialist foreigner employees from four different countries were managed by him. In 2015, he began his new position in Rekan Group Georgia as Executive Manager and quickly realized that Georgia is one of the best countries a person can invest in.