The parliamentary opposition members are demanding the creation of a temporary investigative commission regarding the property of the former Prime Minister of the country and the acting chairman of the ruling Georgian Dream, Irakli Gharibashvili.
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Members of Citizens and United National Movement, as well as independent deputies, held a briefing on this issue in parliament today.
"We want transparency, transparency, and only transparency. Expenses should be transparent everywhere - the non-governmental sector is transparent. No matter how much the Georgian Dream deceives itself, if anything is opaque, it is the government and the incomes of government members.
We do not want to rely solely on assumptions, so we are initiating an investigative commission regarding the possible undocumented property of Gharibashvili and his family. We would like to conduct this process in a qualified manner, ensure transparency, and determine whether Gharibashvili and his family members are really involved in bribery," said the leader of Citizens, Aleksandre Elisashvili.
The creation of the investigative commission is being initiated by 35 opposition MPs. According to Teona Akubardia, if the ruling party refuses to create an investigative commission, "it will once again prove that transparency is only for them and is only a cover to distance the country from the West."
According to the property declaration, last year, Irakli Gharibashvili's salary for the position of Prime Minister was 45 104 GEL. However, within one year, his family's expenses exceeded 130,000 GEL. The declaration states that in 2023, as in the previous year, Irakli Gharibashvili's parents gave 150,000 GEL as a gift. Additionally, his father, Tariel Gharibashvili, paid 109 500 GEL to rent the government plane that the Prime Minister used to bring his 18-year-old son, Nikolozi, who was going to study in the United States of America, to Munich. In his declaration, Irakli Gharibashvili did not indicate how much it costs to educate his son, a student at the University of Pennsylvania, and to live in America.
When asked about the legality of his property, Irakli Gharibashvili, who left the position of Prime Minister on January 29, said: "My father may be a pensioner, but he has a multimillion-dollar business and property under his official ownership."
According to Article 42 of the Constitution of Georgia, a temporary investigative commission is established in Parliament on the initiative of at least one-fifth of the members of Parliament (30 deputies). The support of 50 deputies is required to create the commission. The representation of the opposition in the commission should not be less than half of the total number of commission members.
Last year, the parliamentary opposition tried to create a temporary investigative commission to study corruption in the judicial system and mobilized 50 votes, but this issue did not come to a vote. Deputies of Georgian Dream disrupted the voting three times by not registering for the session as a sign of solidarity with the judges and by not creating the necessary quorum (the presence of 76 deputies) to start voting. Georgian Dream applied the same method even when the opposition wanted to create an investigative commission on the issue of fraudulent Call Centers.
