Tuesday,
More Armenian POWs Freed By Azerbaijan
• Naira Bulghadarian
ARMENIA -- People stand at a Russian military plane with some of Armenian
captives upon its arrival at a military airport outside Yerevan, December 14,
2020
Azerbaijan set free and repatriated five more Armenian prisoners of war late on
Tuesday.
The soldiers were flown from Baku to Yerevan by a Russian military transport
plane. They were immediately taken to a military hospital in the Armenian
capital for a medical checkup.
Dozens of other Armenian soldiers remain in Azerbaijani captivity. Most of them
were taken prisoner in Nagorno-Karabakh shortly after last year’s
Armenian-Azerbaijani war.
Many of these POWs were given lengthy prison sentences earlier this year in
trials condemned by the Armenian government. Armenia regularly demands their
unconditional release, saying that they are held in breach of a Russian-brokered
agreement that stopped the six-week war.
Azerbaijan says the agreement does not cover them because they were captured
after the ceasefire took effect in November.
Baku freed this summer 30 Armenian POWs in exchange for maps of Armenian
minefields in districts around Karabakh that were retaken by Azerbaijani forces
during and after the war. Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev claimed early this
month that those maps are not accurate and said Yerevan should provide more
detailed information.
Shortly afterwards Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian signaled his readiness to give
Baku more such maps to secure the release of more Armenian prisoners.
It was not immediately clear if the release of the five Armenian soldiers was
the result of such an exchange. They returned home ahead of a fresh round of
Russian-mediated talks in Moscow on the reopening of transport links between
Armenia and Azerbaijan envisaged by the Karabakh truce accord.
Jailed Mayor’s Backers ‘Rounded Up By Police’ After Election Win
• Gayane Saribekian
Armenia -- Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian (L), Goris Mayor Arush
Arushanian (C) and other officials walk through the center of the town,
September 12, 2020.
Dozens of supporters of the jailed opposition-affiliated mayor of a major
community in Armenia’s Syunik province were reportedly taken to a local police
station for questioning one day after he was reelected in a weekend vote.
An opposition bloc led by Arush Arushanian, the mayor of the town of Goris and
surrounding villages, defeated the ruling Civil Contract party by a wide margin
three months after his controversial arrest. Arushanian remains in detention.
The Armenian police deployed additional personnel in Goris and raided the bloc’s
local headquarters during Sunday’s vote, searching it for several hours. It
emerged afterwards that they suspect Arushanian’s father and campaign manager
Gagik of trying to bribe local voters.
Representatives of the opposition bloc bearing the arrested mayor’s name
denounced the police raid as a government attempt to influence the outcome of
the closely watched election. Arushanian’s bloc won 62 percent of the vote,
according to preliminary election results.
Armen Melkonian, a lawyer representing the bloc, said on Tuesday that 33 of its
members and supporters were taken in for questioning in Goris on Monday. “This
is real terror,” he told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service.
Melkonian, who was present at the interrogations, dismissed police explanations
as “ridiculous.” Gagik Arushanian also categorically denied trying to buy votes.
“They want to discredit us but won’t succeed,” said the mayor’s father. “This is
fresh blackmail. This is a loser’s mindset. They can’t come to terms with their
defeat. There is not a single person who can come out and say that they were
offered [a vote bribe.]”
Armenia - Arush Arushanian's father Gagik talks to journalists in Goris, October
17, 2021.
Vladimir Abunts, Civil Contract’s defeated mayoral candidate in Goris, defended
the police actions and denied that they are aimed at bullying local opposition
forces.
Arushanian Sr. was not charged with any crime or even questioned by the police
as of Tuesday evening. Nor did the police issue any statements on the crackdown.
Daniel Ioannisian, who coordinated election observers deployed in Goris and
other parts of the country, said they heard claims about vote irregularities
committed by both the ruling party and Arushanian’s bloc. He criticized
law-enforcement authorities for not investigating allegations that a government
loyalists handed out vote bribes in Tegh, a rural community not far from Goris.
Civil Contract won the local election held there.
“We see in the government’s behavior a failure to properly investigate what
happened in Tegh, but we see no problem with what they are doing in Goris
because we have credible information that vote bribes were distributed in
Goris,” said Ioannisian.
The Yerevan-based activist did not specify whether members of his monitoring
team witnessed any instances of vote buying.
Arush Arushanian, in office since 2017, was one of the four heads of urban
communities in Syunik who were arrested shortly after the June 20 parliamentary
elections on various charges rejected by them as politically motivated. They all
demanded Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian’s resignation and joined the main
opposition Hayastan alliance formed by former President Robert Kocharian in the
run-up to the snap polls.
Arushanian was remanded in pre-trial custody on July 16 after being charged with
trying to buy votes. The Special Investigative Service (SIS) claims that he
ordered the head of a village close to Goris to provide financial aid to local
residents who will promise to vote for Hayastan.
The 30-year-old community chief strongly denies that, saying that the poverty
benefits approved by the local council were allocated on a regular basis and had
nothing to do with the general elections.
Pashinian Backs Closer Economic ‘Integration’ With Russia
Armenia - Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian and other senior officials attend a
Russian-Armenian business forum in Yerevan, September 20, 2021.
Armenia is committed to further deepening commercial ties with Russia, its main
ally and trading partner, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian said on Tuesday.
“The Russian Federation not only plays a key role in maintaining peace and
stability in our region but also occupies a central place in our country’s
economy,” Pashinian said in an address to a Russian-Armenian interregional
conference held in Yerevan.
“We need to improve our economic relations in a way that will foster the
development of competitive industries in our countries,” he told government
officials and businesspeople from the two states attending the forum. “In this
context, we regard as important further mutual integration of our economies,
which must be based on a free movement of goods, services, labor and capital.
The [Russian-led] Eurasian Economic Union serves this strategic goal.”
Bilateral commercial ties should be diversified to cover knowledge-based sectors
of the Russian and Armenian economies, added Pashinian.
According to Armenian government data, Russian-Armenian trade rose by almost 12
percent in the first eight months of this year, to $1.54 billion, after
shrinking by 4 percent in 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic. Russia thus
remained Armenia’s number one trading partner, accounting for about 31 percent
of its overall foreign trade, compared with the European Union’s 20.2 percent
share in the total.
Russia’s Deputy Minister for Economic Development Dmitry Volvach hailed the
renewed growth in bilateral trade when he spoke with journalists during the
Yerevan forum.
Russian companies plan to invest $1 billion in the Armenian economy “in the near
future,” the Armenpress news agency quoted Volvach as saying. He said the
investments will be channeled into energy, transport and other infrastructures.
Speaking at a recent Russian-Armenian business forum in Yerevan,
Russian-Armenian billionaire Samvel Karapetian said his Moscow-based Tashir
Group will invest up to $600 million in the Armenian energy sector in the coming
years.
Tashir owns the South Caucasus country’s electricity distribution network,
largest thermal-power plant and second most important hydroelectric complex.
Armenian Court Asked To Approve First Asset Seizure
• Naira Bulghadarian
Armenia - The main entrance to the Office of the Prosecutor-General.
Armenian prosecutors have asked a court to allow the confiscation of expensive
properties belonging to the family of a former security official who was fired
last year after allegedly disclosing an influential government minister’s
criminal record.
Serob Harutiunian, who used to run a counterintelligence division in the
National Security Service (NSS), his wife and son risk becoming the first
persons to lose their assets, worth a combined 485 million drams ($1 million),
as a result of a controversial law enacted by the Armenian government last year.
The law allows prosecutors to seek asset forfeiture in case of having
“sufficient grounds to suspect” that the market value of an individual’s
properties exceeds their “legal income” by at least 50 million drams ($110,000).
Courts can allow the nationalization of such assets even if their owners are not
found guilty of corruption or other criminal offenses.
A spokesman for the Office of the Prosecutor-General, Gor Abrahamian, told
RFE/RL’s Armenian Service on Tuesday that the Harutiunian family’s assets,
including an expensive apartment in downtown Yerevan, caught the law-enforcement
agency’s attention when it was conducting a separate criminal investigation in
early 2020.
Harutiunian was accused at the time of leaking to an Armenian newspaper the fact
that then Minister for Territorial Administration Suren Papikian had spent a
year in prison for stabbing his commander during his compulsory military
service. Papikian, who is now the country’s deputy prime minister, publicly
urged law-enforcement authorities to find out who publicized “the secret
information relating to my private life.”
The NSS colonel was eventually cleared of the charges but still lost his job. He
and his family members will now have to prove the legality of their holdings in
the court. The prosecutors filed a relevant lawsuit on Monday.
The law in question allows an out-of-court settlement of such cases which would
require suspects to hand over 75 percent of their assets to the state.
According to Abrahamian, the prosecutors hope to cut such deals with about a
dozen other individuals also suspected of illegal enrichment. They include
Vladimir Gasparian, Armenia’s national police chief from 2011-2018, Arman
Sahakian, the former head of a government agency on privatization, and a niece
of former President Serzh Sarkisian.
Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian has repeatedly portrayed the asset forfeiture
mechanism as a major anti-corruption measure that will help his administration
recover “wealth stolen from the people.” Opposition figures have condemned it as
unconstitutional and accused Pashinian of planning a far-reaching
“redistribution of assets” to cement his hold on power.
Reprinted on ANN/Armenian News with permission from RFE/RL
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