The Ministry of Economy, acting on my instructions, will develop a relevant bill in relation to the EU Directive on Fair Trade. Such a statement made today the Prime Minister of Georgia.

“On my instructions, the Ministry of Economy will now develop a relevant bill in relation to the EU Directive on Fair Trade, the reason why we will continue working with importers and large chains and, in parallel, we will also refer this document to the Parliament. And I hope that the Parliament will exhibit readiness, and they in fact have confirmed this and expressed support for us, so that this EU Directive, these regulations may be introduced in our country as well. Otherwise, it will be a crude artificial intervention on our part.

Therefore, we have found a way to adopt in our country a practice that has been tried in Europe. In this way, fair rules will be effectively enforced. Importers will have defined margins, markups, and particular rules will be defined for retailers. This solution has emerged as a result of these brief two weeks of work. Reducing prices is very important to us, and essential goods should not be sold with unreasonably high pricing margins. This impacts our population, our people. When discussing inflation, the past month’s inflation was 9.4%, of which food prices accounted for 6.1%.

Thus, we can assume that, as soon as these issues are regulated-and it may happen very soon-the inflation this year will drop to the indicator set by us, to about 5%. Of course, this good will ultimately impact our people’s pockets and incomes. This is why we have come up with this solution to this issue. The Government will soon refer this document to the Parliament, and we will have relevant regulations very soon. Otherwise, there is simply no solution. I do not want anyone to feel as though the Government were crudely intervening in the operations of business. This is not our style and practice. This is the solution we have found and, similar to the case of medications-when we regulated and reduced prices by 60-80%, and adopted the European practice of reference prices-we have decided to adopt EU regulations and directives, and we hope that prices will start dropping very soon”, - said Irakli Garibashvili.