Financial losses due to auctions

01/08/2006 Lilit SEYRANYAN

The mentioned announcement also states that while organizing those auctions, documents were falsified and the state had financial losses. “The RA president’s control department has found out that the sums that citizens paid for using lands either didn’t reach the budget or reached partially. The documents presented to the state cadastre bodies were falsified”, as stated in the announcement of the supervisory department.

Since the mentioned announcement didn’t say anything concerning whether those violations were registered in Yerevan or not, and since the municipality had not been informed about that, we decided to ask Vahram Barseghyan for information. He told us that their department had not finished their work yet and that they were working to find more violations. “As this process is still continuing we are petitioning citizens to inform us about any details they have. The goal of the mentioned announcement was to make our work easier. After discovering more cases we will make a new announcement”, said V. Barseghyan. “There were people that registered those lands. As the documents they presented to the cadastre didn’t differ much from the original ones they were accredited. There are many such cases; currently we have 72 such cases under consideration. The sum of losses due to these violations covers one billion dram. Currently this process continues”, said Vahram Barseghyan. In response to our question whether they had found out who had committed those violations he said, “those violations were not done by individuals, some people used the opportunity and did that”. According to him, those violations were committed by a group of people, whose cases are under proceedings in the public prosecutor’s office. According to him, after preceding this case they will find out whether those people were involved in those violations or not. He said that he didn’t want to mention names because the prosecutor’s office might later say that they were not connected with those violations.

We tried to find out where exactly those cases had taken place, but they didn’t say that, “There is a group of people that did such things, after they finish the criminal proceedings we will reveal everything”.

On July 3, “168 Hours” wrote that the police had arrested the uncle (Sargis Baghdasaryan) of former NA speaker Arthur Baghdasaryan. Sargis used to head the cadastre body of Kanaker-Zeitun community and was later released.

According to our information, Sargis Baghdasaryan didn’t do that fraudulence by himself and after the case was discovered a group of people resigned too. Besides that, we wrote that 4-5 officers of the mentioned cadastre body were arrested and accused in violations. According to our information, Sargis Baghdasaryan is free now and the investigation has been under investigation for more than a month now.

The prosecutor’s office may hardly come out with any information concerning the registered violations and punish anyone. We all know how the Armenian prosecutor’s office works; they release the real criminals and arrest and punish other ordinary citizens “in favor of the Republic of Armenia” and “justice”. This case is one of those numerous cases when the innocent goes to jail instead of the criminal.