A day after the A-320 plane crash in Sochi, Artak Antonyan- director of the “Grand” insurance company insuring the plane-announced that each of the relatives of the victims would receive up to 20,000 dollar compensation. The company started registering the relatives’ documents 20 days after the crash.
Another twenty days has passed, but the documents are still being registered. Nobody really knows just what the insurance company is doing. It’s clear that the insurance company needs the information received from the black box decryption, but that decryption is taking a long time. However, regardless of that, each passenger is insured and must receive the compensation. When director of the “Grand” insurance company Artak Antonyan announced that each of the victims’ relatives would receive the compensations after the plane crash, he added that the company had reinsured its risks at 14 London Lloyts markets. In other words, these companies must make the payment to “Grand” company so that the latter can give the compensation to the relatives.
Since we don’t really have much information concerning the decrypted black boxes and there is a doubt that the Sochi airport has something to do with the plane crash, a question comes up: could the reinsuring companies refuse to give the compensations to “Grand” or less than the expected amount? What’s also interesting is how “Armavia” is going to pay the compensations and with what interest rate has it insured the plane and the victims? Perhaps the human factor will be looked at as a big factor and the London companies will refuse to provide total compensations to “Grand”. After all, insurance companies always try to come up with reasons in order to pay less. However, even if the London companies decide not to give the compensations to “Grand” based on this or that reason, then “Grand” will be the one responsible for giving the relatives’ compensations, because each passenger insured his life by buying the ticket.
In any case, “168 Hours” once again asked “Grand” company about insuring the relatives’ compensations, to which they said:
“We are still taking in documents”.
“168 Hours” hasn’t been able to find out any information from that company to this day. The telephone operators say that only the director of the company can respond to the questions, but we weren’t able to contact director Artak Antonyan in his office for the past one and half months. On June 19, one of the workers managed to call the director on the phone, but then she said that Antonyan wasn’t going to be in his office the whole day. When we asked her if we could come to the office and find out some information from other specialists, the operators, especially Arpine, were trying to convince us not to because their workers weren’t there and they probably wouldn’t be during the day.
We begin to suspect the “Grand” company for giving a limited amount of information. Why don’t they want to let the relatives and the public know just how they got the 20,000 dollar compensations? Perhaps they have a bigger amount. When are they going to give the compensations? Won’t the company have any problems with the reinsurance companies?
Regardless of what was said on the phone, we paid a visit to the office and the worker sitting in the director’s waiting room told us that “Artak was in the next office”; Arpine told us that he was on his break. It turned out that Antonyan was in his office, but he didn’t want to talk with us on the phone in the morning or in the afternoon, when we were at the office. We weren’t able to meet with any of the specialists there and get some information. Some of the workers gave some information that we already knew. One of them even said that they had fixed the 20,000 dollar amount based on some international contracts of which she knows a lot about, while the other corrected her and said that that was probably stated in the Warsaw convention. There were other pieces of insignificant information. We tried to find the answers to some questions from the company lawyer, but he wasn’t there either…and so on. No matter how much we try not to predict anything or suspect, we still come to the conclusion that there is something fishy going on with the compensation amount and provision at the “Grand” insurance company. After all, “Grand” is an insurance company and just like other companies and it is also trying to make small calculations, even if the case is the plane crash. The sad thing is that we are dealing with companies like “Armavia” airlines and the “Grand” insurance company, where we have non-professionals and where the directors don’t care about their customers, much less the high quality customer service.