Ruling party head says EU officials’ recommendations taken into account in forwarding deoligarchisation bill to Venice Commission

Irakli Kobakhidze, the chair of the ruling Georgian Dream party, on Tuesday said the ruling team had taken into account the recommendations of Oliver Varhelyi, the European Union commissioner for neighbourhood and enlargement, and the EU ambassador to Georgia, on forwarding the domestic bill on deoligarchisation for comments to the Council of Europe’s Venice Commission.

The comments follow the statement by Mamuka Mdinaradze, the Georgian Dream executive secretary, who on Monday said the ruling team had decided to forward the bill for comments to the Commission, instead of the planned session of the third reading of the draft at the parliament.

• Ruling party secretary: bill on deoligarchisation to be forwarded to Venice Commission

In the end, we decided to forward the bill to the Venice Commission, before it is finally adopted in the third reading. The reason for this was a request that we heard publicly from Oliver Varhelyi. The recommendation of the European Commissioner was to forward the document to the Venice Commission”, Kobakhidze said.

“Also, we had a meeting with the newly appointed EU ambassador. I also had a personal meeting, and we heard a request from him to forward the bill to the Venice Commission. Even now, I think that it was not necessary to forward this document to the Venice Commission, although since there were such requests, we took it into consideration. Accordingly, the bill was sent”, he continued.

• EU welcomes Georgian parliament’s move to request Venice Commission opinion for deoligarchisation bill

Kobakhidze claimed it was “in the interests” of the domestic opposition to maintain the “oligarchic influence” of David Kezerashvili, the former defence minister and now owner of a TV channel, the imprisoned former president Mikheil Saakashvili and TBC Bank founder and now opposition party leader Mamuka Khazaradze, among other figures, against the current version of the bill.

Accordingly, they want deoligarchisation not to be implemented in Georgia. The only purpose why they wanted to send this bill to the Venice Commission was to delay its implementation and deoligarchisation in Georgia”, Kobakhidze concluded.