“You know that I resigned from my position five days ago, and thus according to the NA laws, I have to confirm my resignation now. I am currently confirming my resignation and since there is no session today, I am doing that with the help of journalists by making an announcement”, said Arthur Baghdasaryana at the National Assembly, after which he gave pens to journalists as presents and then left the hall smiling.
But rumor has it that Arthur Baghdasaryan isn’t taking it easy and is going through some heavy times what with losing what he had. Besides that, he chose the golden hall of the parliament to announce his resignation, because he knows that he will miss the good old days and wants to use his last opportunity to enjoy what he has.
We can say the same concerning the room of the NA speaker in the parliament building, which he was not able to leave easily. On the other hand, they say that it is very difficult to leave a place that you have been dreaming of very long. According to our information since the resignation, Arthur Baghdasaryan has always been visiting his workplace early in the morning and has left late at night. He used to organize his meetings in his room as well. One of NA officials, who has good relations with Arthur Baghdasaryan, told us that Arthur feels very bad about leaving his room because as soon as he set foot there in 2003, he ordered to start reconstruction and renovate the room, and then last year he ordered to do that again because he thought that the reconstruction hadn’t been done well.
And now, the most amazing thing is that he doesn’t want to leave his room in spite of the fact that he has already approved his resignation. Being an oppositionist, he wants to have a room in the third floor of the parliament, which is used for the NA speaker and vice speakers. According to our information he has applied to the personnel management department of the parliament to give him several rooms on the third floor because he doesn’t want to go down to the second floor. But that’s not all. It turns out that Arthur Baghdasaryan is trying to arrange positions in different governmental bodies for those people who have provided the Rule of Party with votes. The problem is that during the past couple of years, he arranged positions for these people in the parliament and president’s office, and now he is faced with a problem to remove them to other places. For instance, 7 chiefs of NA departments out of the existing 10 are Rule of Law members, besides that there are a lot of other low level officials there that represent the Rule of Law. He has threatened parliament employees either to join their party, otherwise he will fire them and their positions would be given to other Rule of Law members.
All advisors of the NA speaker were members of their party. The first step that he took after presenting his resignation was to move these people to another department (20 people). After his resignation he has opened new positions of specialists in each department of the parliament and ordered to put tables there for them. Parliamentarians say that this is a violation because according to the “RA law on civil service”, NA employees are considered to be civil servants and are given positions or removed only through open competitions. In spite of this Arthur Baghdasaryan has decided to ignore the law that was adopted by the parliament during his term. Rumor has it that all Rule of Law members are “very clever” because during the recent years almost all winners of competitions were Rule of Law members; Arthur Baghdasaryan even opened many extra departments with the purpose of providing vacancies for their partisans. Each of these departments has branches, so by opening such departments he provided many vacancies. In other words, he gave positions to Rule of Law members wherever he could, and where he couldn’t, he made those people join Rule of Law. Head of the NA personnel management department (Varduhi Khachatryan) and the NA chief accountant are from Rule of Law as well.
So, now we understand why he doesn’t want to go down from the third floor, where everyone respects him, to the second floor, where people may forget what he has done for them and call him Arthur again, but not Arthur Baghdasaryan. Besides that, Arthur Baghdasaryan doesn’t want to lose his bodyguards either and says that the state must provide this service for him legally like it provided for ex president of Armenia Levon Ter-Petrosyan. People who have contact with him these days say that Arthur Baghdasaryan doesn’t want to believe that he will turn into what he used to be before becoming the NA speaker. He is worried about this, and this is probably the reason why he compares himself to former speakers of other countries and says that the European countries have a lot in common with their former speakers. A week ago we asked Arthur Baghdasaryan whether it wasn’t much to take over 30 business trips during three years and he compared himself with Europeans again, “You’d better compare me with European speakers, they take over 10 business trips per year”.
In other words, Arthur Baghdasaryan is going through some heavy times because he wants to have privileges and rooms in the third floor, while being oppositionist.
P.S. Recently Arthur Baghdasaryan changed the car that his wife used to drive (Mitsubishi model). Currently, Arthur Baghdasaryan’s wife drives a Nissan model car, which costs over 30.000 USD.