The First Deputy Chairman of Georgian Dream faction in the Parliament said that for European bureaucrats, wealthy NGOs were merely instruments to exert influence over certain processes in the country and to shape the political opinion of society.

His comments came after the former senior US State Department official Mike Benz, in an interview with Liz Truss, commented on the issue, saying: “Now they claim that Europe needs some kind of transparency law, but 15 months ago, this class of EU bureaucrats was threatening Hungary and Georgia with sanctions for adopting such laws".

In his remarks, Levan Machavariani stressed this was precisely why European bureaucrats opposed transparency: "They came up with every possible lie to discredit the simplest transparency law and even went so far as to attach a so-called "Russian" label to it. However, as time goes on, the absolute majority of our society is becoming convinced that all of this was false".