Movement for Fair Georgia members to become “more active”

Members of former Prime Minister Zurab Noghaideli’s Movement for Fair Georgia Party have announced their plans to become “more active” starting on Monday. A group of the Movement members, who organized an extraordinary session last month to dismiss the Chairman of the Party, Zurab Noghaideli from his post, are expecting to receive a reply from the Ministry of Justice about registering a new composition of the party, the Movement for Fair Georgia members reported.

According to the member of the organizational group, Nato Khokhiashvili, they will file a request to the Ministry of Justice for providing a new registry paper on December 10th. “We will have a reply from the Ministry by Thursday. We are expecting a positive answer, because if we would have received a negative one, we would have already been informed. All the documents were provided and in full order,” Interpressnews agency quoted her as saying. Khokhiashvili pointed out that in the event a new composition of the party is approved, all assets which belong to Movement for Fair Georgia, including its offices, inventory and documentation will move into the hands of the organizational group.

Part of the members of the Movement for Fair Georgia held an extraordinary session on December 23rd and dismissed Zurab Noghaideli from the post of Party Chairman. Noghaideli was visiting Moscow while the decision was being made. Part of the Movement for Fair Georgia members accused Noghaideli of “discrediting” them. “In order not to pay promised salaries to the party members, he declared them as betrayers,” Chairman of the extraordinary session, Sergo Javakhidze said. According to the participants of the meeting, the protocol of the session was sent to the Ministry of Justice for registration.

The confrontation between Noghaideli and a group of his party members became public late November, when the heads of seven regional offices of the Movement for Fair Georgia Party declared their “distrust” towards the party leader. They claimed that Noghaideli did not pay salaries to the people involved in the “door-to-door” campaign last spring. “The situation has been tense since then. The door-to-door campaign was a good idea, however the decisions were being made by non professionals and this caused the failure of the program,” head of the Saburtalo branch of the Party, Nato Khokhiashvili claimed, adding that several weeks before the elections, Noghaideli refused to finance a door-to-door campaign.

Zurab Noghaideli has downplayed the claims of his party members, saying that the people who are blaming him have been “sent by the government.” According to Party officials, the claims of the regional organizations’ heads did not come as a surprise for them, due to reorganization within the movement, the authority of all regional branches has been terminated. In a statement released later in December, Noghaideli said that “a dirty one month long campaign” against his party was organized by a high ranking Interior Ministry official.

The Movement for Fair Georgia has called on the government to “stop the dirty campaign”. “The Movement warns everyone that it provided all the information it has to the Georgian population, international organizations and diplomatic corps,” the statement reads. In addition, Noghaideli announced that no further comments would be made on this issue any more.