High-level corruption is fully allowed in the country, no institutional mechanism that should stop it is working, Sandro Kevkhishvili, head of the anti-corruption team of Transparency International-Georgia, said in an interview with IPN.

As the representative of the organization states, there is no low-level corruption in the country, however, the problem of "elite corruption" is pressing.

"There is no low-level corruption in the country, in this regard, one way or another, the problem is solved. Bribery is at a low level, a citizen does not need to pay a bribe to receive various government services, which was the case before. This is a great achievement, and if it continues, it is good news. If you look at the government's announcements, it is often said that we are represented well in this and that index, we are ahead, which is indeed the case, globally it seems, because corruption in the delivery of public services has been eradicated. However, these indices do not measure more complex corruption, there are different terms - for example "elite corruption", which we call high-level corruption. It is more difficult to measure such a problem with numbers, so it is less visible in the indices. We have a problem of elite corruption in Georgia. When contracts, licenses or different types of decisions are made, there are always corruption risks and factors, we find examples of this all the time and there is no mechanism to stop it.

For example, every Monday, the government meets, and if you look at the agenda, there are 3-4 points in total, where it is written that property is given directly to a specific company, and they do not publish decrees, which state the identification code and what property is given. No one says that privatization should not happen, but it should be open and public, only the name of the company is written, and the decrees have not been published for 3 years. If the company has a unique name and not many companies have that name, we still get the details. In many cases, such companies are donors of the ruling party, or its directors, shareholders are connected in various ways to the decision-makers. This is elite corruption, when various types of connections determine to whom money, state property goes, and not what is good for the economy, for the country, it goes to the side and personal connections come to the fore, this is the definition of corruption. We have this problem in the country," says Kevkhishvili.

According to him, the discovery of such facts is not followed by an appropriate response.

"Several years ago, we started to make a kind of list, similar to a catalog, of "high-level alleged corruption cases". As of today, we have investigated 151 cases involving 162 high-ranking officials, including 13 judges, 28 members of parliament, 28 members of the government or their deputies, and 54 municipal level officials. Half of them are still valid today, some of them were in previous years. In these cases, we constantly send letters to the Prosecutor's Office, the State Security Service, and the Audit Service. As a rule, nothing happens from them, in very rare cases there may be a reaction. The Prosecutor's Office does not even tell us whether the investigation has started or not. Let's say we don't trust any journalistic investigation, there are many sources, there are 151 scandalous cases, let's say at least 20 are real, shouldn't the investigation be started? This gives us the reason to conclude that high-level corruption is fully allowed in the country, no institutional mechanism, formal, which should stop it, is working, or in fact, they are politically subjugated and cannot perform their function, the Prosecutor's Office does not do its job, because it serves political purposes," Kevkhishvili says.

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