Update 10.05.2012: The City Hall has said that will cancel the contracts signed with Greenservice and will send the case to the law enforcement agencies for further examination. Residents of Tbilisi have probably noticed that cypress trees have been

Updated 16 May, 2012 There are cases in Georgia when government assets are privatized via a “direct sale” method: the property is sold to a specific buyer, for a symbolic sum (often just GEL 1), in return for commitments by the purchaser to carry ou

On April 10, 2012 the Georgian Parliament discussed the draft law “On Free Trade and Competition” in the third hearing. Transparency International Georgia published comments and suggestions concerning the draft earlier. Now we will focus on the subst

Last week we visited the newly build hospital in Chiatura, one of the many hospitals in Georgia built under the new hospital plan. President Mikheil Saakashvili opened this new multilevel hospital that provides all basic hospital services in Dec

Ahead of the Parliamentary elections in fall, developments in the Georgian media landscape largely reflect the polarized and tense political environment. Revaz Sakevarishvili, a prominent Georgian journalist, resigned from his post of editor-in-chie

A new set legal ammendments exempts investors from any legal responsibiilty for negative impacts on the environment, such as pollution and contamination, that their project has caused. On 20 March 2012 the Parliament of Georgia adopted amendments to

The amount of large-scale, one-time budgetary programs implemented by the government usually increases with the forthcoming of elections. Most recently such kind of a novelty appeared in a form of so called “Summer Job”, a new student summer employme

The origins are unknown for the 38% (2 278 442 GEL) of the United National Movement’s total income and for the 6% (53 289 GEL) of the Christian-Democratic Movement’s income. Such kind of conclusion stems from analysis of the financial declarations su

When the national television outlets - Imedi TV, Rustavi 2 and the Georgian Public Broadcaster’s Channel 1 - reported about the tragic death of 46-year old Solomon Kimeridze in a police station in the town of Khashuri, one fact was striking: Not only

This is the second in a two-part series of blog posts on changes to Georgia's Budget Code. Read the first post here. 1.Lax Responsibility Accounting for Variations between Originally Approved and Revised Appropriations Apart from