AYFB Calls on State Enterprises to Make Their Work Transparent

The Association of Young Financiers and Businessmen - AYFB calls on the Prime Minister of the country, Irakli Garibashvili, to make the working processes of state enterprises more transparent.

AYFB's initiative involves making activities more transparent in the companies/enterprises, where more than 50% is owned by the state.

Every interested party should be able to receive the information without any hindrances. 

"Mr. Prime Minister, We appeal to you with an initiative to extend the rule of issuing public information defined in Articles 28 and 37 of the General Administrative Code of Georgia to all enterprises/companies, where more than 50% is owned by the state.

We think, that this initiative will make company activities more transparent, and every interested party will be able to receive that information without interruptions.

Under the current legislation, state enterprises are not obliged to share any kind of public information with the media, private sector, or other interested parties. We should also point out, that a large part of them are funded from the budget through grants or they implement various projects with funding from international organizations.

It is natural, that such opacity and attempts to hide information often raise suspicions of corruption. As a result, it adversely affects the functioning of state-owned enterprises and their image.

It is also worth mentioning, that a large part of state enterprises have been working on a loss in the recent years. According to the document of 2021 prepared by the Financial Ministry of Georgia, the loss of state enterprises amounted to 237 million GEL, in 2018 - 816 million GEL. Therefore, we believe that increasing the quality of state enterprises and greater accountability to the public will have a positive impact on the financial functioning of companies and, simultaneously, it will increase the responsibility of executives.

Mr. Prime Minister, our organization has been directly confronted with the closed-door policy, which, unfortunately, was pursued by state enterprises for years. We have been trying for several months to make the current situation in the energetical sector transparent, which is related to the mapping of financial flows at the sector level, the construction of high-voltage transmission infrastructure, detailed tariffs for imported electricity, or free access to the different types of analytical data.