What Article 153⁷ covers
Paragraph 2¹ of Article 34 of the Organic Law of Georgia "On the National Bank of Georgia" sets the rule on expressing prices in lari. Article 153⁷ of the Code of Administrative Offences supplies the administrative liability for breaching that rule. If you put goods or services on the market, or commission advertising, and the way the price is expressed does not comply, the matter is dealt with under this article.
One point is worth settling at the outset. The substance of the rule — precisely how a price must be expressed — is not written in Article 153⁷ itself. It sits in paragraph 2¹ of Article 34 of the Organic Law, and that is where it has to be checked in any given case. The Code of Administrative Offences only attaches a sanction to that rule.
Who bears responsibility
The first paragraph names two figures expressly, and the list is not open-ended.
- The person making the offer — the offeror — who expresses the price in the offer;
- the advertising client, that is, the person on whose order the advertisement was placed.
This distinction matters in practice. Advertising material is often produced by an agency and distributed by a medium or a platform, yet paragraph 1 directs the warning at the offeror or the client who ordered it. One of the first things to establish is therefore which role you actually occupied, and the contracts with the agency or the platform are usually what answer that.
The sanctions: a warning, GEL 1,000, then GEL 5,000
The article uses a three-step scheme in which severity tracks repetition rather than the scale of the breach.
- Paragraph 1 — breach of the rule on expressing prices in lari results in a warning to the offeror or the advertising client.
- Paragraph 2 — repeated commission of the same act results in a fine of GEL 1,000.
- Paragraph 3 — each subsequent commission of the act referred to in paragraph 2 results in a fine of GEL 5,000.
For instance, the sequence runs like this: the first episode brings a warning; the second brings GEL 1,000; the third and every one after it brings GEL 5,000. Counting episodes is therefore as consequential as establishing that a breach occurred at all.
One detail often goes unnoticed: Article 153⁷ sets its fines as fixed sums rather than ranges. GEL 1,000 and GEL 5,000 are exact figures, not limits within which an amount is chosen. The dispute in these cases is therefore rarely about how much; it is almost always about which paragraph of the article should apply to the episode in front of you.
Why the first warning is not a formality
Paragraph 2 is tied to repeated commission, which means it presupposes an earlier episode. That is exactly why the initial warning carries weight beyond its face value: it creates the record on which a later and far more expensive step rests. Treating a warning as a piece of paper to be filed away is how organisations reach the GEL 5,000 step without ever having contested the first finding.
The article does not fix a period for repetition — nothing in its text states within what timeframe an act counts as repeated. It is therefore not possible to conclude from the text alone whether an old episode still counts. Nor does the text say whether publishing the same offer across several channels is one act or several. Both questions are frequently disputed, and the answer turns on the material in the particular file rather than on the article.
What you can do, and where a lawyer changes the outcome
In this category of case the dispute is rarely about whether the wording existed. The argument usually moves to other questions.
- Whether you were the offeror or the advertising client in the episode at issue, or occupied some other role.
- Whether the offer or advertisement genuinely breaches paragraph 2¹ of Article 34 of the Organic Law.
- Whether the episode is a first one or a repeat within the meaning of paragraph 2 — this is what decides between a warning and GEL 1,000.
- How many separate episodes the authority counted, since the difference between the GEL 1,000 and GEL 5,000 steps depends on that count.
Once a warning or a decision arrives, the first practical step is to read the document closely: it should tell you which offer or advertisement is at issue and on what date. The next is to build a complete inventory of placements across every channel, because the same wording often survives in several places at once and correcting it in one does not change the overall picture. If you do correct it, keep a dated screenshot — that is the material which later lets you show what changed and when.
A decision can be contested. The applicable deadline and the body that hears the complaint depend on which authority decided the case; Article 153⁷ does not regulate that, so the route must be read off the decision itself rather than assumed.
What to bring
In these cases the material that shows the episodes and their dates is the principal evidence.
- The exact text and image of the offer or advertisement, with its date.
- A list of the channels it was placed on and the period of placement.
- Contracts with the advertising agency, the medium or the platform.
- Any warning received earlier.
- The decision imposing the fine and proof of when it was served.