What Article 155¹¹ requires
Article 155¹¹ of the Administrative Offences Code of Georgia protects a single information duty. A manufacturer and/or importer of heated tobacco or of a new tobacco product must submit, in the established manner, a notification to the Ministry of Internally Displaced Persons from the Occupied Territories, Labour, Health and Social Affairs of Georgia about the placing of that product on the Georgian market. If no notification is submitted, or it is not submitted in the established manner, that omission is what completes the offence — not the quality or the composition of the product itself.
The addressee is defined narrowly: the manufacturer and the importer. The two statuses are not mutually exclusive — the text uses "and/or" — so a company that both produces and imports can be caught in both capacities. If you are a distributor, a wholesaler or a retailer and you neither manufacture nor import the product, the first question to check is whether the protocol has been drawn up against the right person at all.
The sanction the article provides
Article 155¹¹ sets one amount: failure to submit the notification in the established manner carries a fine of 5,000 GEL. That figure is fixed. The article contains no band from a lower to an upper limit, offers no warning as an alternative to the fine, and sets no separate, higher amount for a repeated offence. Nor does it provide for confiscation of the product or for suspension of the activity. The practical conclusion is straightforward: arguing about the size of the fine leads nowhere here, and the position has to be built on whether the duty arose and whether it was performed.
What "in the established manner" means here
The article does not itself describe the form of the notification, its content, or the moment by which it must be filed. On that it points outwards to other regulation and confines itself to setting the liability. This is a detail with practical consequences. The charge is that the notification was not submitted in the established manner, so the file must show exactly which requirement was treated as unmet. Where the protocol carries only a general formulation, and does not identify what element the notification lacked or which product was left unnotified, that in itself is a circumstance to examine. What the decision must recite is not stated in Article 155¹¹; that belongs to the general part of the Code and to the facts of the particular case.
The article also names its addressee in full — the Ministry of Internally Displaced Persons from the Occupied Territories, Labour, Health and Social Affairs of Georgia — so a notification lodged with some other body does not answer the duty as Article 155¹¹ frames it. For the same textual reason the file has to show which product was placed on the Georgian market, and when: it is that event the duty attaches to.
What such a case is really argued about
Because the sanction is single and fixed, the dispute moves almost entirely onto the facts. The questions that arise most often are these.
- Whether the specific product falls within the concept of heated tobacco or of a new tobacco product — a question of classification, and everything else follows from it;
- Whether the product was in fact placed on the Georgian market during the period the protocol covers;
- Whether you are the manufacturer and/or importer of that product, or another link in the supply chain;
- Whether a notification was submitted, and what evidences the fact and the date of submission;
- Whether the charge concerns one product or several, and therefore how many separate episodes the file actually contains.
The last point deserves particular attention. The 5,000 GEL figure is the sanction for one offence, so the scale of the case is decided by how the episodes have been counted and separated in the protocol rather than by the amount named in the article.
What to gather before a consultation
If an inspection has taken place or a protocol has been drawn up, collect the documents that reconstruct the notification history before you speak to a lawyer.
- A copy of the protocol and of the decision with every annex;
- The text of the notification that was submitted and whatever evidences its submission — a registration number, an electronic confirmation, or correspondence;
- The technical description of the product and the documentation that determines its category;
- Import and warehouse documents showing when placing on the market actually occurred;
- Any correspondence with the Ministry.
Where a lawyer changes the outcome
Work on this category of case runs in two directions. The first is fixing the facts correctly while the inspection is still under way and before explanations are given, since that is when it is decided which product and which period enter the file. The second is analysing the decision to see whether the materials establish every element the article requires: the status of the person, the classification of the product, the placing on the market, and the absence of a notification. The procedure and the time limit for challenging the decision are not written into Article 155¹¹; they follow from the general part of the Code and from the procedure stated in the decision itself, so that part of the served document is the sensible place to start reading. On Legal.ge you can find a lawyer who works on regulatory and administrative offence matters and hand the file to them directly.