PM: Increase of Budgetary Expenditures Planned

Prime Minister, Nika Gilauri, said that the government would initiate budgetary amendments, envisaging increase of expenditures by about GEL 312 million.

Although tax revenues have fallen short of initially planned target, the increase of expenditures, PM Gilauri said, would be possible “at the expense of non-tax revenues, grants and credits from the World Bank and Asia Development Bank.”

“It will give the budget additional GEL 50 million,” Gilauri told journalists on June 6.

He said that GEL 260 million would come from treasury bills, which the government plans to issue on the domestic market.
 
Ex-PM Zurab Nogaideli, who now leads his opposition party, Movement for Fair Georgia, warned the government that the state budget might face GEL 1 billion shortfall by the end of the year and called for an appropriate budgetary amendments. He called on the government to cut expenditures at the expense of reducing Interior Ministry’s and Defense Ministry’s funding and to abolish 15% profit tax.

The government said on June 1 that Georgia’s economy would contract by 1.5% in 2009 and blamed the contraction to “street politics” and “crisis of political relations”.

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