Speaker: Transparency Law is painful for foreign actors with malevolent intent, exposing PVT fraud, attacks on GOC, and LGBT propaganda

“If we look back at the history of the last six years, since the 2020 elections, and assess the role that externally funded organisations have played in attempts to stir up unrest in Georgia, as well as the role of those so-called parties which, instead of executing the will of their voters, are executing foreign and external directives,” stated the Speaker of the Georgian Parliament, Shalva Papuashvili.

According to Papuashvili, foreign-funded groups and political parties act not as representatives of the electorate’s will, but as executors of external orders. He maintained that the Transparency Law remains a sore point for actors harbouring hostile intentions towards Georgia, as it has exposed those behind manipulated parallel vote tabulations (PVT), attacks on the Church, and LGBT propaganda.

“Look at every attempt at unrest, starting with the falsified parallel vote count in 2020, where we exercised restraint at the time towards the organisations funding ISFED, making every effort to avoid excessive escalation through our comments. Yet instead of realising their error, including USAID, which knew at the time, and the US Ambassador, who knew that ISFED was spreading false data and that the will of the Georgian people must not be manipulated, we saw them do far worse in 2024.

Regrettably, despite our hopes in 2020 that European organisations and certain states, including the US administration of the day, would learn the lesson of 2020 and cease interfering in the will of the Georgian people, they escalated their actions in 2024. Ambassadors were directly involved in the elections, funding party electoral campaigns. Recall the funding from the Danish Embassy, which bankrolled an entire campaign and refused to halt its funding despite all our internal comments, stopping only after it escalated into a media scandal within Denmark itself.

Furthermore, those who were being funded- the entire leadership of that NGO, as well as the political parties whose campaigns were bankrolled- ended up directly in politics.

Their role is therefore unmistakable. This is precisely why passing the Transparency Law became necessary, as these organisations, embassies, and countries were hiding behind NGOs. They presented an illusion to our citizens that these were local Georgian organisations operating on their own agenda, when in reality everything was dictated from outside, just as USAID ordered the falsification of the parallel vote count. They deceived us in meetings, claiming to know nothing about it, which was later proven to be an outright lie, with USAID misleading the Georgian authorities.

This is not a Georgian agenda, but one imposed from the outside. That is why we are seeing such an extreme reaction. It serves as a clear test: whichever country, government, or foreign entity holds a sharply hostile stance against the Transparency Law exposes itself as having malevolent intentions toward Georgia,” Papuashvili stated.