Armenian opposition leader slams anti-corruption campaign

Arminfo
8 Feb 05

Yerevan, 8 February: The fight against corruption in Armenia today
is nothing but “fiction and lies”, Ruben Torosyan, the leader of the
Human Rights – Democracy Party and of the Supreme Council club of MPs,
told a news conference today.

He lambasted both the anti-corruption council led by the Armenian
prime minister [Andranik Markaryan] and the commission to monitor the
implementation of the strategic programme to fight corruption headed
by presidential advisor Bagrat Yesayan. The monitoring commission
announced the creation of 12 working groups comprising representatives
of 120 public organizations in various spheres, Torosyan said. It
is still unclear which organizations or groups they are talking
about. “I, myself, found out from Aravot newspaper that I am a member
of a working group dealing with the judicial system,” Torosyan said.

He also noted that the recent annual report on the activities of the
commission in 2004 is an outright “lie”. The commission itself has no
basic understanding of the situation with corruption in the country. As
to the data revealed by Yesayan at a news conference concerning some
tax officers who were allegedly fired for corruption, nobody knows
anything about that and it has not been confirmed anywhere, Torosyan
said. He noted that the strategic programme makes no reference either
to the ruling “elite” or to numerous employees at foreign diplomatic
missions “who are partaking in corruption in Armenia with pleasure”.
Let alone the most obvious signs of political corruption as election
fraud and the establishment of a political coalition which was
established in violation of all constitutional norms and is in
itself an act of corruption, Torosyan said. The way out, he says,
is to hammer out a new strategic programme to comba t corruption and
set up a socio-political anti-corruption council.