Another court hearing took place at the Economic court of Armenia with “Royal Armenia” and the State Customs Commission (SCC). Let’s recall that the company has applied to the SCC demanding the commission to consider the recent fixed customs prices as invalid.
During the last court hearing, the representative for “Royal Armenia”, lawyer Gevorg Minasyan had presented a 3 page note to Judge E. Khundkaryan (let’s state the fact that the company has presented another note against the SCC to the judge before and Mr. Khundkaryan has quashed the case). The note, as foreseen by Mr. Minasyan, had been rejected and the judge for the court hearing was Mr. Khundkaryan himself.
This time also the court hearing did not get interrupted. The accused-SCC-was not present in court. The judge said that the SCC had known about the court hearing since December 5, 2005, however, it has not appeared in court and has not let the court know why beforehand.
It appeared that the lawyer of “Royal Armenia” already knew who the judge was and the accused side because it had predicted beforehand that the SCC will not appear in court and had written a proposal to continue the court hearing without the SCC.
The court hearing continued and Mr. Minasyan presented his point of view. Since Minasyan’s speech was pretty long, we will present its content in a word. The “Royal-Armenia” company claims that the SCC has fixed extremely high prices on the coffee imported by “Royal-Armenia”. When the company fixed the price of 1 kilogram of coffee for 80 cents, the SCC fixed it at $1.80 customs price. When the other group from the company fixed the price of coffee for $1.40, the SCC fixed it at nearly $1.50. So, the prices fixed by the SCC, according to Mr. Minasyan, are not logical. The lawyer also stated that they have asked the SCC demanding to present the calculations of the fixed prices which the SCC is obligated to do 5 days after getting the application. However, the customs committee has not presented any calculations for the past two-three months.
“The accused has not applied the laws, but rather they have gone along with predictions,” said Mr. Minasyan and demanded recognizing the customs prices as invalid. Judge Khundkaryan postponed the court hearing, claiming that it was necessary to listen to the SCC’s side and decided to “take steps in order to do that”. In response to our question as to what the court can do, Mr. Minasyan said: “The most we can do is send a note. It can’t do more than that because it is being followed up by the SCC.” Mr. Minasyan accuses Judge Khundkaryan for being objective in his note. He also states that the SCC has contacts and that it has an influence on the court hearing. Based on this, the journalists asked one important question: what do you expect to happen during the case? Mr. Minasyan answered that he has some hopes, but the documents play major roles in the economic part and “after all, we are living in a state and not some bandit group.”
The next court hearing will take place on December 19. As to who will be absent then, it is hard to say. Mr. Minasyan said that he would explain the reason of the absence of the SCC as ignorance towards the court. But he did not state that the reason for the SCC representative not appearing in court was because the SCC representative was stuck in traffic.
Until the court hearing, the company is continuing its work. Mr. Minasyan said that the company is suffering losses due to the high prices fixed by the SCC and is forced to export a large part of the coffee.
P.S. When the court hearing was taking place in the Economic Court, one of our newspaper correspondents met the SCC representative by coincidence on the street and he said that he has not been able to appear in court due to street traffic and has informed the judge over the phone. However, the judge knew nothing about it.