Transparency International Georgia examined asset declarations of the Government and Members of the Supreme Council of Adjara public officials submitted in 2021-2022 and identified inaccuracies in 39% of declarations.
24 out of 62 public officials in the office inaccurately submitted asset declarations.
12 officials did not indicate real estate in the declaration owned by him/her and/or his/her family member.
12 officials did not declare their own and/or family members’ business interests – being a shareholder and director of a company.
11 public officials did not delegate the right to manage shares in the private companies to other persons.
4 public officials did not disclose received remuneration during their tenure. 3 public officials received income from activities restricted by the law.
2 public officials - members of the Supreme Council, Ilia Verdzadze and Fridon Putkaradze took into consideration inaccuracies indicated in our 2019 research, however, the Chairman of the Government Tornike Rizhvadze ignored violations in his asset declaration identified in our 2020 research.
According to the Law of Georgia on Conflict of Interest and Corruption in Public Institutions (CoI), a public official is not required to indicate a company that did not have turnover and did not carry out transactions within 6 years or more before the date of declaration submission. Due to the fact that information about the turnover and transactions of companies is not available to us, Transparency International Georgia uses records of the National Agency of Public Registry about the status of companies – the status of all companies mentioned in the report is “Active”.
*After publishing the research Nino Nizharadze, the minister of healthcare of Adjara autonomous republic explained that the real estate indicated in our research was sold in August 2020. The fact is verified in the public registry data.
The inaccuracy was caused by the different cadastral codes of the indicated property until 2020 in the public registry, also the differences were found in the areas of the apartment itself - in the first excerpts, the area of the indicated real estate was 56, 79 square meters while in the last one - 71,71 square meters. There are some differences between the areas in which the apartment block is located (in 2008 excerpts the area includes 1121, 68 square meters, in 2020 excerpts - 3,051 square meters). Additionally, the minister indicated the various areas of the apartment in her declarations from 65 square meters to 75 square meters.
According to the excerpt provided by the minister, Nino Nizharadze, she had no obligation to indicate the property in her 2022 declarations, therefore, she didn’t submit the declaration inaccurately.
