Speaker Papuashvili: Poisonous seeds yield no noble fruit; what is rotten at the core will yield nothing good

“Noble fruit cannot spring from a poisonous seed; this is precisely what we are witnessing within the opposition. Nothing good can ever come from what is fundamentally rotten at the core,” stated Speaker of the Georgian Parliament Shalva Papuashvili when asked by reporters about ongoing developments within opposition parties.

According to Papuashvili, the ruling party is “watching this unfolding process closely, as the public is discovering much of what previously remained hidden from view.”

“Take campaign finance, for example: we repeatedly warned that foreign funds were pouring into political parties through various back channels. Now they are openly squabbling over 40 million GEL and [former PM Nika] Gilauri. Do you honestly believe that was his own money? That is precisely how intermediary channels were exploited to funnel foreign capital and orchestrate foreign interference in Georgian elections.

It is thoroughly revealing that this 40 million GEL issue is now being laid bare for all to see. They are effectively admitting that ‘black money’ was circulating throughout their campaign. They are acknowledging the use of undeclared income. All of this validates everything we warned about: that fictitious transfers, proxies, and alternative channels were being leveraged to funnel money from foreign intelligence services.

And we all saw what that money was intended for in 2024. They engineered Salome Zourabichvili’s pardon of Nika Gvaramia. One MEP, Viola von Cramon, inadvertently let slip that Gvaramia’s pardon had been pre-arranged in Brussels. She openly admitted they knew beforehand that Zourabichvili would pardon him. Neither the Georgian public nor the government knew anything, yet Zourabichvili cleared it all with Brussels. Gvaramia was released only to have an agent of chaos ready for the autumn post-election period.

For Brussels to turn around and lecture us after all this, when you subject a candidate country to such schemes, interfere blatantly in its elections, including through your own ambassador, attempt to finance its elections with ‘black money’, embolden violent groups and disinformation, and direct aggressive rhetoric against a democratically elected government, to then turn around and accuse the Georgian people is utterly immoral,” declared Shalva Papuashvili.