Georgian Parliament Speaker says developments in US compel foreign embassies to disclose election spending in Georgia

Georgian Parliament Speaker Shalva Papuashvili on Monday said the processes underway in the United States made it mandatory that all the foreign embassies in the country “make public the information on spending every cent, from their respective countries, that went towards elections and domestic political processes in Georgia”.

In his remarks, Papuashvili highlighted that since the new US administration declared that “under the umbrella of foreign aid, American taxpayers’ money was used for imposing made-up ideologies, censorship, domestic meddling, and regime change abroad, then this also puts under doubt the integrity of other foreign states’ funding of domestic processes in Georgia”.

“Now other countries too, should double-check where their taxpayers’ money is being spent. The opposition and civil society in these foreign countries should get interested in where their public money is going”, the Parliament Speaker said.

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“Brussels should lead by example. In autumn of 2023 I sent a letter to the EU Ambassador in Georgia and asked him to enquire about the transparency of the funding from the European Endowment for Democracy (EED), which is colloquially known as the European branch of the American National Endowment for Democracy (NED). After a few months of contemplation, I received a negative answer from the Ambassador, under the pretext that EED is an organisation separate from the EU. Ambassador seems to have reverted to plausible deniability because EED is fully funded from Brussels as well as EU member states’ budgets and is being governed by a few odious Members of European Parliament”, he noted.

He further expressed concerns about the illegal spending of the funds from Brussels and some European capitals during the 2024 elections for the electoral purposes of local political parties.

“We all remember how the Anti-Corruption Bureau had to halt, after pressure from abroad, its investigation of foreign funding, when the concrete foreign donors’ contours emerged behind the political NGOs that were involved in the elections”, the Speaker continued.

“The processes underway in the US make it mandatory that all the foreign embassies make public the information on spending every cent, from their respective countries, that went towards elections and domestic political processes in Georgia”, Papuashvili concluded.