Friday,
Opponents Threaten Legal Action Against Yerevan Mayor
• Gayane Saribekian
Armenia - Hayk Marutian is inaugurated as mayor of Yerevan, October 13, 2018.
Opposition members of the Yerevan city council on Friday threatened to sue
Mayor Hayk Marutian if he refuses to release details of bonuses paid to about
2,000 municipal officials late last month.
Marutian allocated a total of 1.2 billion drams ($2.5 billion) for the yearend
financial rewards to the employees of his office and the administrations of
Yerevan’s ten districts.
The opposition Luys alliance wants him to name those officials and specify the
amounts of bonuses paid to each of them. The mayor has so far refused to
disclose such information on the grounds that it may constitute a privacy
violation.
The Luys leader, Davit Khazhakian, condemned that stance, saying that it runs
counter to an Armenian law on local self-government in the capital. “If the
matter is not solved we will be ready to appeal to the administrative court,”
he warned.
Khazhakian suggested that the municipal authorities may be worried about
negative public reactions to the disclosure demanded by Luys.
One of Marutian’s deputies, Hayk Sargsian, brushed aside Khazhakian’s claims.
He said the mayor’s office has asked the Armenian Ministry of Justice to advise
whether details of the bonuses can be made public.
“I can say that the mayor did not receive a bonus,” Sargsian told RFE/RL’s
Armenian service. “I want to make clear that we are not worried about anything.
Why? Because we are open and transparent.”
Armenia - Mayor Hayk Marutian chairs a session of Yerevan's municipal council,
December 21, 2018.
Luys controls only three seats in Yerevan’s 65-member municipal council,
compared with 57 seats held by Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian’s My Step
alliance.
Marutian, 42, is a close ally of Pashinian. The council appointed the former TV
comedian as mayor after last September’s municipal elections in which My Step
won 80 percent of the vote.
Khazhakian and the two other Luys councilors have repeatedly criticized
Marutian. In particular, they accused him of failing to improve garbage
collection and address the dismal state of public transport in the city.
Marutian and his team have dismissed the criticism. They claim to have already
rooted out corruption in the municipal administration, which is thought to have
been widespread under the previous mayors.
Government Body Stands By Corruption Claims
• Naira Nalbandian
Armenia - Davit Sanasarian, the head of the State Oversight Service, at a news
conference in Yerevan, .
A senior Armenian government official insisted on Friday that the
administration of Yerevan State University (YSU) is responsible for financial
irregularities worth at least 800 million drams ($1.6 million).
The State Oversight Service (SOS) subordinate to Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian
first made these claims last month after looking into financial records of
Armenia’s largest and oldest university mostly financed by the government. It
sent its findings to prosecutors for further investigation.
Nobody has been charged in connection with those allegations so far.
The YSU rector, Aram Simonian, angrily denied the accusations as baseless and
politically motivated late last month. He linked them with his long-standing
membership in former President Serzh Sarkisian’s Republican Party (HHK).
Simonian came under strong pressure to step down after mass protests led by
Pashinian forced Sarkisian into resignation in April. The rector has refused to
quit.
The SOS chief, Davit Sanasarian, dismissed Simonian’s statements, saying that
his agency did conduct an objective “examination.”
“I wouldn’t advise current or former officials to follow Aram Simonian’s
example and immediately claim that they see political persecution and so on,”
Sanasarian told a news conference. “Whether they are from the HHK,
[Pashinian’s] Civil Contract or any other party, they must be equal before the
law and held answerable.”
“I can assure you that if that examination lasted longer those figures
[relating to financial abuses] would be much higher,” he said.
Another senior SOS official, Davit Aydian, said the bulk of the alleged
financial abuses detected by the government body resulted from procurement and
construction tenders administered by the YSU management. The winners of those
tenders did not submit the lowest bids, he claimed.
Moscow Again Slams Azeri Travel Ban On Russian Armenians
• Aza Babayan
ITALY -- Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Foreign Ministry
spokeswoman Maria Zakharova at a press conference in Milan, December 7, 2018.
Russia again demanded on Friday that Azerbaijan stop barring Russian citizens
of Armenian descent from visiting the South Caucasus country, saying that the
practice is “incompatible with friendly relations between the two countries.”
“We have repeatedly raised this issue with the Azerbaijani side and said that
such instances are becoming a tradition, a bad and wrong tradition,” said Maria
Zakharova, the Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman.
“In our view, such facts constitute a blatant violation of the rights of
Russian citizens,” Zakharova told a news briefing in Moscow.
“The Russian Foreign Ministry has repeatedly brought the Azerbaijani side’s
attention to the unacceptability of the existing situation. We have demanded an
end to detentions and expulsions.The practice is incompatible with friendly
ties between the two countries.”
The Azerbaijani government has long maintained a travel ban for not only
Armenia’s citizens but also ethnic Armenians from other countries because of
the unresolved Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. It considers any Armenian presence on
Azerbaijani soil a security risk and an affront to the country’s honor and
territorial integrity.
According to Zakharova, in 2018 there were at least 16 cases of Russian
nationals denied entry to Azerbaijan “on ethnic grounds.”
The most recent of them was reported late last month. Kristina Gevorkyan, an
ethnic Armenian holder of a Russian passport, said that she was held in
detention at Baku’s Heydar Aliyev international airport for 13 hours before
being deported to Russia.
Moscow already publicly denounced the practice in July 2017. Reacting to that
criticism, an Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry spokesman cited continuing “Armenian
occupation” of Azerbaijani territory.
“Unfortunately, some ethnic Armenian individuals display ethnically motivated
hostility, and that is why we take certain measures,” he said at the time.
Incidentally, Russia’s longtime Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov was born to an
ethnic Armenian father. Lavrov visits Baku on a regular basis.
The Azerbaijani ban also applies to presumed or actual ethnic Armenians from
Turkey, Azerbaijan’s closest ally. In 2014, a Turkish arm-wrestler called Zafer
Noyan was reportedly barred from entering Azerbaijan and participating in a
major competition there because of his last name which officials at the Baku
airport felt is Armenian. Noyan was forced to flow back to Istanbul despite his
assurances that he is not of Armenian origin.
Opposition Parties Want Parliament Panel On Eurasian Union
• Astghik Bedevian
Armenia - Empty seats in the Armenian parliament, Yerevan, December 4, 2018.
The two opposition parties represented in the newly elected National Assembly
called on Friday for the creation of a new parliament committee that would deal
with Armenia’s membership in the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU).
The Prosperous Armenia (BHK) and Bright Armenia parties cited different
considerations for having such a committee.
“The authorities have no intention to pull out of the EEU and we should try to
use that membership to the benefit of the country,” said Bright Armenia leader
Edmon Marukian, who called for Armenia’s withdrawal from the Russian-led trade
bloc as recently as a year ago.
“We think that we need a parliamentary platform for dealing with problems which
we mentioned when calling for withdrawal from the EEU and new problems which
emerge every day,” Marukian told RFE/RL’s Armenian service (Azatutyun.am).
The BHK, for its part, believes that the committee should address Armenia’s
relations with not only Russia and other EEU member states but also neighboring
Georgia and Iran. Mikael Melkumian, a senior BHK parliamentarian, said leaders
of the incoming parliament majority loyal to Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian
have signaled support for its establishment.
The new National Assembly will start its inaugural session on January 14. One
of its first tasks is to determine the number and the names of standing
parliament committees.
BHK deputies are expected to chair two of those committees. Another panel
should be headed by a representative of Bright Armenia.
The former Armenian parliament had nine committees. One of them was tasked with
facilitating Armenia’s “European integration.” According to Lena Nazarian, a
senior member of Pashinian’s My Step alliance, that panel will continue to
exist.
Marukian, Pashinian and another prominent politician co-headed the now defunct
Yelk alliance that campaigned for Armenia’s withdrawal from the EEU in late
2017. Pashinian has favored Armenia’s continued membership in the bloc since he
came to power in May.
"We are committed to further integration within the Eurasian Economic
Union and treat seriously our chairmanship in the EEU," Pashinian said during a
meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow on December 27.
Press Review
“Haykakan Zhamanak” says that the 10 percent rise in the price of Russian
natural gas imported by Armenia will have an impact on the Armenia economy
despite government assurances that internal gas prices will remain the same.
The paper disagrees with those who blame the price hike on last spring’s
“velvet revolution” that brought Nikol Pashinian to power. It argues that the
most recent Russian-Armenian agreement on the gas price was always supposed to
run until December 31, 2018.
“As regards Russian-Armenian relations, we need allies, not sponsors, and in
this sense the abolition of sponsorship only helps to create truly allied
relations [between the two countries,]” concludes the paper edited by
Pashinian’s wife, Anna Hakobian.
“Aravot” wonders if former journalists elected to the new Armenian parliament
on the ticket of Pashinian’s My Step alliance will abandon skepticism
characteristic of their profession and only sing the current government’s
praises. “If they continue not to take everything at face value, then kudos to
them,” editorializes the paper. It says that in the past 28 years many decent
individuals have lost their sense of humor and become arrogant after entering
politics. “In purely visual terms, most of the deputies of the newly elected
National Assembly look more likeable than their predecessors,” it says. “It is
essential that their brains do not get covered by thick layers of fat. That
would reflect negatively on their appearance as well.”
Eduard Sharmazanov, the spokesman for the former ruling Republican Party of
Armenia (HHK), tells Lragir.am that former President Serzh Sarkisian should
continue to lead the HHK. Sharmazanov also says that the HHK will make other
changes in its leadership at an upcoming congress in Yerevan. The online
publication says that many HHK figures are opposed to Sarkisian’s possible
replacement by former Defense Minister Vigen Sargsian, who topped the party’s
list of candidates in the December 9 parliamentary elections.
(Lilit Harutiunian)
Reprinted on ANN/Armenian News with permission from RFE/RL
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