No one can deny that by the order of the Prime Minister Tigran Sargsyan in the governmental elite the interest to the Armenian language has slightly increased. When following the statements of Sargsyan one momentarily remembers Dostayevsky (as Geghamyan would say), where the heroes are speaking with abstruse phases and sound gracious. Even if they are speaking about the simplest things, such as beer drinking, they use a difficult language. The unfortunate things among our politicians is that at first sight they are saying something great, patriotic and gracious but after the euphoria goes away and one starts to analyze the statements he/she realizes that the opposite is coming from the words. The best evidence of the abovementioned is the recent meeting of the prime minister with the tax bodies. “We are pretty decisive and are not going to be scared or make replacements among staffers. It is going to be a wide-spread process. We are examining the system and are trying to find out who owns businesses in this sector. It is going to be impossible to hide those businesses. We will find out the ones, who support their businesses through their official positions,” said Tigran Sargsyan and added that if there are people like that they’d better leave the system voluntarily. What does this mean? First of all, in past there was an absolute chaos in this sector in the previous years; the tax officials have been doing whatever they wished and were never punished. The second impression is that the corrupt tax officials, who had made millions through illegal methods are now allowed to voluntarily leave the system and enjoy their millions without punishment. For a moment one thinks that even if they are bad and now they changed let them work. But there are no grounds for that. We may be accused of giving wrong impulses to the society but those impulses are first of all provided by the tax bodies. For example, we would advise to examine this field and find out what authorities the tax officials have when they enter to supervise the tax policy of stores and stalls or how they write fine tickets. They often get very sincere by confessing that their bosses make them find illegalities and provide inflow in the state budget. Let’s pass from the tax sector to the transport sector. There were many rumors that after the subsidization of the propane price the transportation fares would be increased. According to the owners of mini bus branches after the increase of the propane gas price the fare must be at least 200 AMD per person. But two days ago the newly appointed Transport Minister Gurgen Sargsyan told the journalists that it is not a substantiated price and that in accordance of the government calculations the price makes only 58 AMD. At first sight we must be happy about this. It seems that the state worries about the citizens. But here we have the second question. If after the increase of the gas price the fare makes only 58 AMD how come during many years of the cheaper price the mini bus fare was 100 AMD. Why would they allow certain people to have super incomes? Shortly said, we still have the opposite outcome. By the way, it is not worth blaming the mini bus drivers. They would agree working with 100 AMD fare if they would have the chance to pay less to the owners of the mini bus lines. But who are the owners of the lines? Yes, you are right, MPs, relatives of the officials, etc. In these conditions the parliament is discussing the bill on increasing the salaries of MPs, statesmen, mayor of Yerevan and other high-ranking officials. Correspondent of “Hayots Ashkharh” daily had conversation with the co-authors of the bill, yesterday. RPA MP Rafik Petrosyan said “The law in which we propose to make amendments and supplementations has been adopted still in 2002, but the salaries of the high ranking state officials haven’t changed during the previous six years. Whereas the salaries of the civil employees have been reviewed several times. Therefore members of four factions of the parliament came out with an initiative to review the salaries of the high-ranking officials. The country’s Prime Minister and Speaker of NA who get 340 thousand drams (300 thousand after retention) can’t cover the expenses linked with the activity of an MP. We have proposed to double the salaries of the high-ranking officials. We have taken into consideration our people’s social state and continuous inflation. We have also taken into account the fact that the employees of the private sector, in fact, get more salaries than the MPs. The increase of the salaries of the high-ranking official is a matter of prestige for the state as well. We must pay proper salaries to our MPs, Ministers and other high-ranking officials. This way we can stop the overflow of our best specialists to the private sectors were they get higher salaries. For example, would Rafik Petrosyan himself, who makes 300.000 AMD quit his mandate and go work for a private company at 700.000? Or can he even mention a name of an MP, who would agree to do so? Why would a person offer election bribe, get elected and rely only on the salary. Only one provision must be added in the legal bill, “the MPs must receive free yogurt after an extremely tense working day.” Besides that private companies now evaluate knowledge and they don’t need someone just to press buttons. As a response to the opinions that it is a normal step and that it’s not worth complicating the process, and that the MPs deserve to receive more salary we offer to conduct a simple calculation. We have 131 MPs and the salary of each of them is going to be increased by 300.000. The sum is 39 million 300 thousand. Let us multiply this by 12 (months) times and we will have 471 million 600 thousand AMD. This is equivalent to approximately 1.5 million USD. Thus, it means that our true patriots are trying to empty the budget by 1.5 million every year on their own behalf. Maybe they can’t afford paying their bodyguards. Misters, can you imagine what can be done with 1.5 million USD? We would advise you to read the materials of our reporter Lusine Stepanyan. We advise you to read about the 4-year-old Sevak, who knows that the rats are cold because he had a bite in his leg. He lives in the basement of the third hostel of Nor Aresh. There are plenty of rats there. The son is sick and may soon be attached to a wheelchair and you are speaking of the reputation of the country. Don’t worry about the reputation of your country only because of the luxury Brabus and Porsche cars parked in front of the NA on Demirchyan street.
