What Article 163 describes
Article 163 of the Georgian Code of Administrative Offences, headed "Breach of the certification rules", consists of a single sentence. Its operative wording is narrower than its heading: what the article describes as an offence is a breach of the rules for issuing a certificate. That difference is not merely terminological. The heading points at the certification process as a whole, while the operative part addresses the specific stage at which a certificate is issued.
For that reason, if liability is being imposed on you under this article, the first thing to establish is exactly which rule you are said to have breached, and whether that rule concerns the issuing of a certificate at all. The article itself does not list those rules and does not point to any particular regulation. The applicable rules sit in the sectoral regulation governing the certificate in question, and that is where the examination of the case actually begins.
The sanction the text provides
Article 163 provides for one penalty only: a fine. In the words of the text, breach of the rules for issuing a certificate results in a fine of 300 to 500 minimum amounts of labour remuneration.
Two details of that sentence matter in practice. First, it is a range rather than a single fixed amount, so the specific figure is settled in the decision itself; the article fixes only the lower and upper limits. Second, the fine is expressed not in lari but in minimum amounts of labour remuneration, and the article does not itself state what that unit is worth in lari. The legislative note under the article records a State Council decree of 3 August 1992 and Law No 510 of 27 November 1996 — entries that show when the text was amended, not when the article entered the Code. If the decision you received states a concrete sum in lari, it is worth checking how that sum was calculated, because the figure does not follow directly from the text of Article 163.
What this article does not settle
The brevity of Article 163 is itself useful information. The text does not contain several of the things people most often look for first:
- it does not name the body that imposes the penalty;
- it sets no deadline for appealing;
- it provides for no confiscation, suspension of activity or other additional penalty;
- it creates no separate, more heavily sanctioned limb for a repeat breach;
- it does not specify which certificates are meant.
Answers to those questions come from the document you were served and from the sectoral regulation, not from Article 163. If you read a specific deadline, a lari figure or an authority's name attributed to this article, it is worth asking where that information came from, because it does not come from the article's own wording. That does not mean no such rules exist — only that their source lies elsewhere and must be identified.