Corruption in Georgia

Georgia’s ruling administration representatives consistently state that, after the Rose Revolution, the fight against corruption was quite successful, serious achievements are visible and that it has been almost eliminated. So far, we have seen several scandalous arrests of state officials at different levels, which proved the success of the state policy against corruption. However, independent analysts still make skeptical comments claiming that corruption has changed its character and that the scales of corruption have not decreased at all. Economic analyst, Gia Khukhashvili, thinks that corruption within low and middle level bureaucracy has significantly decreased and that this is clearly a positive result. It cannot be compared with the previous period of Shevardnadze administration. But Khukhashvili thinks that the amount of money involved in corruption recently has increased considerably as corruption went from lower realms into the higher echelons of power. So, one could say that corruption is not blatantly visible to the ordinary people in their everyday life, but the money involved has increased several fold and the situation is not particularly encouraging. Analyst Davit Narmania thinks, that some legislation has encouraged corruption because the explanations of how to perform this or that actions concerning state money were ambiguous. The processes were clumsy and crooked people took advantage of such discrepancies. It is suggested that serious steps should be taken in the direction of legislative norms, which should be more clear, transparent and easy to interpret.