A new list published by TI Georgia connects political donors with the companies that they control.

One positive development in the transparency of Georgia’s political party financing has been the release of lists of donors to Georgia’s political parties for the period of 1 January through 8 August 2012. Although TI Georgia has previously identified shortcomings in the way this information has been released, we were able to convert the files to Excel.

Due to the ban on political donations by corporate entities, it is not possible to use the donors’ lists to identify which of Georgia’s corporations support political parties. As noted in our recent report on the pre-election environment, corporations in Georgia may sometimes act in ways that could be perceived as supporting political parties over their own commercial interests, and so this makes knowing the political affiliations of those who control companies in Georgia very important.

Unfortunately, there is no easy way to find out which donors own companies based on public sources; the Public Registry’s company database does not allow users to search within company extracts, which is where companies publish information about their ownership and executives.

However, we have recently automatically downloaded (“scraped”) the majority of the corporate records available on the Public Registry’s website. This allows us to perform searches which are not possible using the Public Registry’s website. This allows us to investigate the corporate affiliations of those who have donated to political parties. For example, two partners in the retail chain Nugeshi, Uta Maziashvili and Gocha Darchiashvili, each donated GEL 60,000 to the United National Movement (UNM). As another example, Davit Galuashvili, Deputy General Director in Cartu Bank, donated in total GEL 37,429 to the Georgian Dream. We want to be clear that we are not alleging any wrongdoing on the part of any of these donors or corporations, or that any of these donations were made on behalf of a corporation.

We can also compare the rate at which political donors are affiliated with companies. For example, 404 UNM donors out of 735 donors appeared in our list as being affiliated with companies, compared with 64 out of 673 for the Georgian Dream. To provide another point of comparison, the average donor to the UNM contributed approximately GEL 22,666, whereas Georgian Dream’s donors contributed approximately GEL 1,554 each, on average. The median donation was GEL 10,000 to the UNM, and GEL 32 to the Georgian Dream. The total amount donated to the UNM by donors with some sort of company affiliation was GEL 10,102,251 (out of GEL 16,659,586 total); donors affiliated with companies donated GEL 540,184 (out of GEL 1,046,159 total) to the Georgian Dream.¹

We can’t confirm that this is a complete list, but we believe it’s important nonetheless and we wanted to release this information as soon as possible to provide voters with robust information about the political affiliations of corporations ahead of the elections. If you discover any gaps or errors in our information, please let us know by leaving a comment below.

¹The State Audit Office website lists several files for the Georgian Dream, labeled “Georgian Dream -- Democratic Movement” and simply “Georgian Dream”. We combined these files for the above analysis. In addition, we should note that some donors made multiple donations, and so the total number of individual donors is slightly different from the number of donations. In the above analysis, the median is calculated by donations, rather than by donors.

Please click on the links below to see the tables

New Rights

Christian-Democratic Movement

Conservative Party

Democratic Movement Georgian Dream

Unity for the Real Idea

Free Georgia

For Renewed Georgia

Georgia Not For Sale

Industry Saves Georgia

National-Democratic Party

National Forum

Georgian Dream

Our Georgia - Free Democrats

United National Movement