FORMER PREMIER SAYS GLOBAL FINANCIAL CRISIS YET TO HIT ARMENIA

Aravot
Oct 10 2008
Armenia

A former Armenian prime minister has dismissed the Armenian
authorities’ optimism that the global financial crisis will not affect
the Armenian economy, predicting that the crisis is going to hit the
county hard in two to three months.

Speaking at a news conference on 9 October, Hrant Bagratyan,
an economist by training, said that the Armenian authorities’
statements that the crisis would not affect the Armenian economy
were not serious and absurd, the pro-opposition newspaper Aravot
reported on 10 October. It is also quite likely that the incumbent
prime minister and members of his cabinet "don’t really understand
the link between the American crisis and our country", he added.

"The Russian VTB bank, which has a branch in Armenia] has a liquidity
problem, oil and gas prices are going down [on the world market],
and the prices for copper and molybdenum have sunk catastrophically,"
Bagratyan said. "The British government is trying to bail out the
HSBC. Now they [the Armenian government] are going to say that this
bank has nothing to do with us either."

Speaking on the possibility of opening the Armenian-Turkish border,
Bagratyan said he favoured the opening "but it should not be linked
to the Karabakh issue".

"I can see no economic threats," he said. "At first, there will be
something similar to what happened in 1991-92, when cheap Iranian
goods flooded Armenia. Some short-term shocks might happen, but in a
year or so, we’ll see that our development opportunities are bigger. I
am sure we have relative advantages over our nomad neighbours."

He also slammed President Serzh Sargsyan for not mentioning the
tragic consequences of the 1-2 March unrest in Yerevan in his recent
address to nation. "If there are casualties, there are killers. It
was a shame not to speak about it," Bagratyan said.

At a separate news conference on the same day, another economic expert
and former member of the Armenian parliament, Tatul Manaseryan, said
the global financial crisis had had almost no effect on the Armenian
economy. "The Armenian market is very small, so it cannot sustain
serious damages," Aravot quoted him as saying.