Georgia: over ten mass media evicted from their offices

The "Kavkassia" Georgian Independent TV Company has failed so far, after eviction on August 10 from the building of the "Samshoblo" (Homeland) Publishing House, to find any alternative office premises and resume its broadcasting.

Nino Dzhangirashvili, a spokesman of the "Kavkassia" Company, has reported that they had held talks with the owners of two objects, but the Ministry of Economic Development of Georgia has caused pressure on them, as a result of which the TV Company still has no office. This is the topic of the report of the IA "News-Georgia."

The above building had housed editorial boards of many well-known and popular Georgian newspapers and magazines, including the office of the central newspaper "Georgian Republic" and Russian-language newspapers "Free Georgia," "Evening Tbilisi" and "Golovinka Prospect," magazines "Dila" and "Podruga" (Girlfriend), offices of the Publishing House "Asaval Dasavali," "Hit-FM" Radio Station, premises of the oppositional "Kavkassia" TV Company and the Georgian Bureau of the MIR CIS Interstate TV Company, which had its satellite equipment in the building and which was used for broadcasting their TV news from Georgia by such leading world agencies like the Reuter and the Associated Press.

The journalists who worked in the building marked that nobody had ever warned them in advance that they would have to leave the premises.

However, Ilya Gotsiridze, head of the Privatization Department of the Ministry of Economic Development, has stated: "We have repeatedly declared that the building was illegally occupied by 90 organizations whose leasing contracts had expired or, more often, were not signed at all. We don't even say here that they paid nothing to the state, they failed to pay even for communal services."