The economic week was strangely glutted both in terms of information and events. The most important event was unfortunately expected. The US government has long ago stated that it was going to cease the funding of the Millennium Challenge Corporation project in Armenia. They promised to cease and they did so. The Corporation was supposed to provide 235 million USD for the Armenian projects since 2006 but only 177 million USD was provided. And now our government had to state that the Yerevan office was going to be dissolved. The renovation of inter-community roads still remains a burden for the Armenian state budget. As though this bad news wasn’t enough when it was stated that compared to the previous year the number of tourists to Armenia has reduced. The official reason is the extended winter season. They wouldn’t possibly say that the tourists avoid coming to Armenia during the pre-election period, where the last elections ended with March 1. The author of the next dubious economic information is the national statistics service. They said that in our country there was deflation. They gave us a long explanation that closer to spring the prices of vegetables have reduced. But the next information implied the opposite picture. It turns out that the minimum consumption basket has started to grow. But in Armenia no one figures out the techniques of counting consumption and stapled goods baskets. Even the authors of statistics don’t figure that out well. So this rumor will not be in the center of the society’s attention. Compared to the previous year the number of imported cars to Armenia has reduced by approximately 9%. Moreover, the quality of the imported cars also drops. 55% of the imported cars cost less than 5000 dollars. Last year the average price of the imported cars was 7,3 dollars. This year this figure is 6,3%. This and the previous numbers, according to the Marxist are antagonistic to the declarations, which the parliamentary candidates filled out. Their declarations are very strange. It proves that our businessmen, who consider themselves MPs, don’t feel like paying taxes. Who can ever compare the actual flows to our state budget with the actual property of our MPs and candidates? The law requires the candidates to declare their taxes and properties. Something has really been changed during these elections because the candidates declare a lot of property and funds. As a result of that, quite interesting facts were disclosed. For example, RPA members, executive branch representatives of Armenia, such as the Prime Minister and the ministers keep their savings in the banks with 50-50 proportion. It means that they are saving half of their money in foreign currency and the next half in drams, which has been devaluated for years. By doing this, they want to show that they have a national way of thinking. This logic contradicts the declaration of the head of the RA President’s service of state audit Hovhannes Hovsepyan. This statesman holds his savings with the proportion 1:9. He saves the funds equivalent to 300 thousand AMD in drams and 2 million 270 thousand in USD. A totally different picture is with the savings of the businessmen including in the ruling coalition of the parliament. According to official statistics, Sisian is a town with 17,000 population. It is a small unemployed town. A Republican MP Hermine Naghdalyan in her declaration mentioned that last year she received 422 million 119 thousand AMD from her Sisian Bust LTD, which is approximately 1 million 80 thousand dollars. Of course, we can’t claim that the whole population of Sisian didn’t have that type of income last year. But let’s agree that it’s not fair that the income of the population of the whole town is compatible with the income of one person. Prominent businessman Gagik Tsarukyan declared that in 2011 he had 140 million USD income. So based on this the government of the US has decided to cut the funding of the MCC. As they say in the famous advertisement – “Wait for more.”
