By Robert Zargarian
YEREVAN (Azatutyun) — The Armenian government has officially seized two of the several dozen companies belonging to Gagik Tsarukyan that were effectively closed by them last week during the opposition leader’s arrest promised by Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan.
One of them is Armenia’s largest cement plant located in the southern town of Ararat. Pashinyan said his government will nationalize the plant when he campaigned for the June 7 parliamentary elections in which Tsarukyan’s Prosperous Armenia Party (BHK) was one of the main opposition contenders. He has since repeatedly pledged to imprison and “dispossess” Tsarukyan as well as the leaders of two other key opposition groups.
The Office of the Prosecutor-General announced on Thursday that a court in Yerevan has agreed to place the plant under the government’s “management and maintenance” pending a verdict on prosecutors’ demand to confiscate Tsarukyan’s assets worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The office claimed earlier, following Pashinyan’s pre-election pledge, that it had been illegally privatized in 2002.
Pashinyan seemed confident that the court will allow the asset forfeiture when he said last week. “Ararat Cement will be state-owned very soon.”
One of Tsarukyan’s lawyers, Yerem Sargsyan, noted that the court did not even bother to notify him and his colleagues about the injunction. He said this only proves that he acted on government orders.
