What Article 95 covers and who it applies to
Article 95 of the Georgian Code of Administrative Offences deals with breaches of the norms and rules for using gas as fuel and as raw material. It is not a household provision. The sanctioning clause names the people who carry the liability quite precisely: the heads of enterprises, associations, institutions and organisations, their deputies, chief power engineers (chief mechanics), and the heads of workshops and services. Liability under this article therefore attaches to a post a person holds, rather than to the gas-consuming organisation in the abstract.
That drafting choice matters more in practice than it looks. The decisive question in a real case is often not whether something was wrong at the site, but whose duty the particular act or omission was — which is why internal orders, job descriptions and the documented allocation of responsibilities frequently do more work here than any technical argument about the installation.
The conduct the article lists
Article 95 does not use an open formula. It enumerates the situations it punishes, and each of them is a separate allegation:
- releasing gas into gas-consuming installations without the permission of the state gas supervision bodies;
- exceeding the allocated gas funds, or failing to observe the established regime of gas consumption;
- consuming gas on gas-consuming installations without approved specific consumption norms, or exceeding those specific norms;
- operating gas-consuming installations without accounting for the gas consumed, or for the heat energy and the products generated by using gas;
- the absence or malfunction of the automatic controls for gas combustion processes provided for in the installation's design, of heat-engineering control instruments, or of heat-utilisation equipment — the devices that secure the rational and efficient use of gas;
- failure to prepare the reserve heat facility provided for the gas-using enterprise, association, institution or organisation for operation, or failure to prepare the gas-consuming installations to run on the prescribed type of reserve fuel.
The sanction: a warning or a fine
The article provides two outcomes: a warning, or a fine of six to ten minimum amounts of labour remuneration. Two practical points follow. First, the warning is not a courtesy — the article puts it on an equal footing with the fine, so material showing that the defect was corrected, that consumption stayed within the approved limits, or that no consequences followed is worth assembling early rather than after the decision is issued. Second, the article expresses the fine in units of minimum labour remuneration and does not itself state any sum in lari. The amount written into your decision has to follow from that unit, which makes the arithmetic in the decision something to verify rather than to accept on sight.
How the case usually unfolds
In practice matters start with an inspection at the site: the permission, the approved specific norms, the metering points, the automatic combustion controls and the readiness of the reserve fuel are all examined. A record of the administrative offence is then drawn up, and it should state which of the listed forms of conduct is attributed to which person. Article 95 itself does not regulate which authority draws up that record or which body hears the case — those questions are governed by other provisions of the Code. The only authority the article names is the state gas supervision body, and it names it in one limb only, as the body whose permission the release of gas into the installations requires.
It is worth reading the record closely on the day it reaches you. A description that merely repeats the wording of the article, without identifying the installation, the norm and the period, leaves you guessing at the case you must answer — and the documents that would answer it are easiest to obtain while the inspection is still recent.
What can be put against the charge
Defence work here normally runs along three lines. The first is the subject: whether you fall within the closed list of office-holders the article names, and whether the act complained of was in fact within your remit. The second is qualification: because the article enumerates its conduct, not every technical shortcoming found at a gas-using site fits it. A temporarily faulty metering point and the absence of the automatic combustion control that the design required are not the same allegation, and a record that blurs the two is open to challenge. The third is the size of the sanction: the article offers both a warning and a range, so a large part of the work is aimed at moving the outcome towards the lower end of that range, or towards a warning.
No outcome can be promised — the fate of a decision turns on the specific facts and documents. What representation changes is whether the facts in your favour are collected, put into a form the deciding body can act on, and filed while they still count.
What to bring
The fuller the file, the sharper the assessment can be. It helps to have:
- the record of the administrative offence and the decision, if one has already been issued;
- the inspection act, together with any photographs or video taken at the site;
- the permission, the approved specific consumption norms and documents showing the consumption regime;
- technical documentation for the metering points, including calibration and repair records;
- documents showing the readiness of the reserve heat facility and of the reserve fuel;
- internal orders and job descriptions showing how duties were allocated between posts.