On October 16 during the elections for mayor in the city of Vanadzor, a lot of officials (RA prime minister Andranik Margaryan, Head of Lori Marz region Henrik Kochinyan, major-general Arshaluys Paytyan as well as former head of Lori regional national security head Artashes Harutyunyan, who is the relative of Artashes Tumanyan) voted for republican candidate Samvel Darbinyan. Several years ago Artashes Harutyunyan was fired because he was representing the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF). Later due to ARF representative Vahan Hovhannisyan and Artashes Tumanyan he was able to get his job back. In that period, A. Tumanyan was responsible for coordinating the pre-election campaign of Samvel Darbinyan. Of course A. Tumanyan didn’t do that for free: his purpose was to strengthen his economy in the Lori region.
At first A. Tumanyan exported metal to Georgia through this region without paying taxes with the help of the former head of Lori National Security service (now he works as a deputy to the NSS head), Romik Harutyunyan. The former head of Vanadzor police department, colonel Alik Alexanyan knew about this. He ordered head of the criminal investigation department, Arthur Shahverdyan (whose nickname is “Shakht”) to find out who backed that business. As a result of this A. Shahverdyan brought some workers that took out metal from factories that were out of use and took them to the local police station.
Later Romik Harutyunyan met the regional police head, A. Harutyunyan and talked to him. But later when he saw that head of the regional police department and the head of the criminal department didn’t want to obey him, he informed A. Tumanyan about it. Later A. Hrutyunyan visited the local police department of Vanadzor and after checking the registration books he found out that some workers had been brought to the police station without any reasons. But he didn’t find any details in the registration books about the names of those workers. In fact, at the time A. Shahverdyan was on vacation. He had asked for permission to go on vacation from the RA police head, Haik Harutyunyan and had written that he was going to spend his holidays in Armenia, but as it turned out later he had left for Europe. Later R. Harutyunyan informed A. Tumanyan about this. A. Tumanyan did his best to start an investigation connected with this. As a result of this the head of the Vanadzor police board, Alik Alexanyan was fired and as for A. Shaverdyan, he was punished and was moved to a much lower position. And after overcoming these two obstacles, the former head of the president’s office started his active business in this region.
It is worth mentioning that in 2004 A. Tumanyan, with the help of Romik Harutyunyan, asked the mayor Samvel Darbinyan to give a territory to his friend, Robert Mikayelyan to build a café and furniture trade hall. S. Darbinyan did this and gave a territory to Artashes Tumanyan’s friend. Later they cut 11 silver Christmas trees that were 30 years old in that territory in order to build a café instead. For your information please note that A. Tumanyan also owns a 12 hectare land in Nubarashen community. A worker that drives a tractor in that land once fell down from the tractor, got physical injuries and was taken to a hospital. He is 40 years old and has five children. He went through operations, and Artashes Tumanyan took care of all medical expenses. The public prosecutor’s office of this community hasn’t instituted any legal proceedings to find out the details of the incident. According to our information, they just didn’t want to get into anymore trouble or have contact with former head of the president’s administration.