The Parliament of Georgia adopted the bill on deoligarchization in the second reading [76 - in favor, 6 against].

The vote was preceded by a debate. The parliamentary opposition demanded postponement of the second reading of the law. They proposed to the Georgian Dream to send the draft law to the Venice Commission before the second reading, and in this regard they mentioned the recommendation of European Commissioner Olivér Várhelyi.

According to the document, an oligarch is a natural person who simultaneously satisfies at least three of the following conditions in order to have significant economic and political influence in public life: participates in political life; has a significant influence on mass media; is an ultimate beneficiary of the entrepreneurial legal entity, which occupies a dominant position in the market and which maintains or exercises this position for 1 year; the confirmed amount of his assets and those of entrepreneurial legal entities where he is a beneficiary, as of January 1 of the relevant year, exceeds 1,000,000 times the subsistence minimum established for able-bodied persons.

The following matters are governed by the proposed law: The definition of the term “oligarch”; the issues of identifying someone as an oligarch and having them entered into the appropriate register; the issues of having someone removed from the register of oligarchs and the production of that register; the legal repercussions of doing so; the issues of certain people having to fill out declarations regarding their contact with the oligarch and their representative.

According to the draft, the date of entry into force of the law is defined as June 1, 2023, and the law will be declared invalid from June 1, 2033. The draft law was developed within the framework of the implementation of the 12-point plan defined by the European Commission and it was initiated by the Legal Issues Committee.