President Saakashvili tripped up by his mania for deregulation

December 14, 2009 by georgiamedia

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Mikheil Saakashvili - who repealed Georgia's anti-monopoly legislation and who now proposes an "Economic Liberty Act" that would make new anti-monopoly legislation extremely difficult to enact - has claimed Georgia's pharmaceutical companies are acting as monopolists to push up prices.

In a visit staged for the TV cameras today the president lamented that drugs were cheaper to buy abroad and moaned "two to three pharmaceutical companies that have taken control over everything and divided the market resulting in prices rising 20 to 30 to 40% following this monopolism."

The president also used the photocall to shift the blame - claiming it was due to patent issues (in fact the Transparency International report shows it is largely due to vertical integration in the market - a practise either banned or heavily regulated elsewhere in Europe but which Georgia's deregulation mania does nothing to limit) and then telling the health minister Alexander Kvitashvili that he had 2 - 3 months to sort it out - another one of the "good Tsar" moves Misha seems to have picked up from study of Vladimir Putin.

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