“The British Embassy has ignored the questions and concerns of the Georgian public, and in response, we have once again received an unfriendly statement,” Parliament Speaker Shalva Papuashvili wrote on social media.

Papuashvili responded to the embassy’s statement, which reads: “The UK is deeply disturbed by reports that the Prosecutor General’s Office has frozen the accounts of seven NGOs as part of an investigation into alleged acts of sabotage. We are concerned they have been targeted as part of a politically motivated effort to silence independent voices, rather than a legitimate response to any unlawful activity.”

“I would like to remind the public that just a few weeks ago, the British Embassy attempted to provide funding to organizations with an extremist agenda — namely, Tamar Chergoleishvili’s partisan outlet Tabula and UNM-affiliated Gia Japaridze’s radical group Academy of the Future. In both cases, the pretext for this funding was their alleged preparation of journalistic materials on local elections and election monitoring, even though both entities have openly sought to disrupt the electoral process.

Naturally, this raised serious doubts among the public that the embassy’s true aim was not to support free and fair elections, but rather to financially strengthen groups working to sabotage them.

At the time, I called on the embassy to act with full transparency — to clarify how it came to fund radical, partisan organizations and to disclose which groups it was supporting during the 2024 elections.

As in previous instances, the embassy ignored these questions and concerns of the Georgian public. Instead, we received yet another unfriendly statement directed against the Georgian people,” Papuashvili stated.