PM Announces Large Tax Debt Relief Ahead of Elections
On April 8, Prime Minister of Georgia Irakli Kobakhidze declared at the Government session that all natural persons, including individual entrepreneurs, will have their recognized unpaid tax debts incurred before January 1, 2021, including penalty taxes, fully written off.
According to the Prime Minister, after the adoption of the relevant bill, 145 thousand individuals will be released from tax debts totaling GEL 590 million [over USD 220 million].
“Quite a large number of individuals in Georgia have tax arrears, and because of this, they lack the opportunity to conduct economic activities. Therefore, we decided to write off the respective debts,” the Prime Minister said.
The decision comes in the context of the parliamentary elections slated for October 2024. It is not the first time the Georgian Dream government has used debt relief in the campaign context. Ahead of the second round of the hotly contested presidential elections in 2018, the Georgian Dream government negotiated a deal with banks and non-banking lenders to write off of small debts of more than 600,000 individuals and to remove them from the lenders’ “blacklists.”
This post is also available in: ქართული (Georgian) Русский (Russian)
