In February 2015, the Minister of Energy of Georgia, Kakha Kaladze, stated that about USD 640 million would be invested in Georgia’s energy sector in 2015 alone. FactCheck verified the accuracy of this statement at that time. According to the information provided by the Ministry of Energy of Georgia, a total of USD 340 million of investments was planned in Georgia’s energy sector, including both domestic and foreign direct investments. The USD 640 million, stated by Mr Kaladze, also included investments planned for expanding the South Caucasus Pipeline. A total of USD 300 million was planned to be invested in 2015 in terms of the aforementioned project. The statement of the Ministry of Energy of Georgia was rated as TRUE

at that time.

In order to sum up the results of 2015, FactCheck has returned to this issue. We requested data from the Ministry of Energy of Georgia about both domestic as well as foreign direct investments in Georgia’s energy sector in 2015. We also asked for information about the amount of investments made in terms of the expansion of the South Caucasus Pipeline system. According to the information received from the Ministry of Energy of Georgia, a total of USD 556,177,000 was invested in terms of the expansion of the South Caucasus Pipeline system which is 85% more than originally planned. The investments made in terms of this project will be recorded under the investments in transport and telecommunications fields. According to the data of the first three quarters of 2015, foreign direct investments in Georgia’s energy sector amounted to USD 41,490,000. It should also be noted that according to the data of the National Statistics Office of Georgia, the amount of investments in the country’s energy sector in the first three quarters of 2015 was 72.5% less than in the same period of the previous year. As for domestic investments, according to the information of the Ministry of Energy of Georgia, a total of USD 50 million was attracted from Georgian banks for investing in the country’s energy sector in the first nine months of 2015. According to the data of the first three quarters of 2015, the combined amount of domestic and foreign direct investments in Georgia’s energy sector equalled USD 91.5 million which is significantly less that the amount initially planned at the beginning of the year. However, since the data of the fourth quarter of 2015 are still unknown to us, we leave Kakha Kaladze’s statement WITHOUT VERDICT. After the appropriate statistics are published, FactCheck will once again revisit this issue.