They discovered this later. The general prosecutor’s office is already researching the transactions and 108 cases have been brought up in court. The prosecutors claim that five people are prison, three people are arrested and seven are under persecution. In fact, one of the prisoners is head of the treasury subdivision of the Davtashen cadastre branch R. Yeghiazaryan. Nearly1.5 billon AMD didn’t make it to the state budget due to these 156 transactions. But what really happened?
156 state property lands were sold and the cadastre has registered all the transactions. The buyers have all presented the receipts. Usually, similar payments are made in banks. But in this case, it turns out that not many payments have been made at the banks and that most of the transactions are based on the receipts.
President of the Armenian State Cadastre Committee (ASCC) Manuk Vartanyan says that there was a case when the buyer presented a 5 million AMD “check”, however it later turned out that he had only paid 5,000 AMD. The 5 million AMD receipt was false. There have been times when the buyer has not paid anything at all, but has presented a receipt with a large amount of money. What’s amazing is that those people only presented the receipts from “ArmSavingsBank” and “Areximbank”, as if those were the banks where they made the payments. The transactions were made during late 2005 and early 2006, nearly half a year. That was exactly the time when they announced that land cadastre prices were going to go up. There was no doubt concerning the false receipts at the state cadastre committee because, accordin to Vartanyan, there is no difference between the fake and the real one. Besides that, they say that the state cadastre committee doesn’t even have the right to check the receipts.
“We don’t have the source to check and see if there is an account The person in charge of checking up on the payment of state taxes and other payments is the person selling the product and levying. If the municipality or state property management department sells property, we are not responsible for that because we’re not the ones selling the land. We simply register that,” says head of the registration department of the State Cadastre Committee Hakob Martirosyan.
According to Mr. Martirosyan, they found out about the phony receipt after a citizen made a phone call. He said that there was some group of criminals, who presented themselves as people wanting to buy land, took the money to be paid at the bank and gave him the false receipt. It’s interesting to know why the people making the 156 transactions agreed to have certain people make the payments. There could be many reasons for this, but most probably the intermediaries promised to “make” the transaction at a more suitable price. They took the land and tricked them. This would have been revealed later on if it weren’t for the citizen who made the phone call and if he didn’t try to find out if the payment had been made. They checked and saw that the money hadn’t been transferred and that’s how everything was revealed.
All 156 transactions were made in Yerevan and most of them were in the Davtashen and Kanaker-Zeytun communities. The Yerevan municipality was the owner, or better yet, the seller of the transactions. State property under the supervision of the Yerevan municipality was sold; basically, that 1.5 billion AMD was supposed to be transferred to the municipality’s budget, in other words, the state budget. How could the municipality not know that that much money didn’t make it to the budget?
“Yes, the municipality sells and puts land on auction. After the transaction, we sign a contract with the renter, which wants to buy the land. Afterwards, he has to pay the land cadastre price and go to the cadastre to register the transaction. However, in November 2005, there was a change in the Armenian land code, according to which, signing a contract is not mandatory for all transactions. These transactions were made after the reform. Since the municipality didn’t sign contracts with the buyers, thus it didn’t know that the lands were sold. We knew nothing about those transactions, they didn’t inform us and tell us why that much money didn’t get transferred to the budget. The municipality didn’t play a role here,” says head of the finances department of the municipality Vahe Nikoyan.
The state cadastre is not obligated to file a report about the transactions made based on the reforms and send that to the municipality. That structure took the receipts and registered the given land as property. It turns out that the Yerevan municipality and the state cadastre did wha they had the right to do, however as a result, 156 citizens suffered because certain people made the payments and that money wasn’t transferred to the budget. If the criminals aren’t found and the money isn’t confiscated, then the citizens will be forced to pay again in order to have the right to own property. The municipality also had losses because it had to take control. A group of criminals came out victorious.
In this case, it’s hard to say whether or not the other three sides aren’t to blame, besides the criminals. One of the sides is the citizen wanting to buy property, who got into a transaction with a group of people and didn’t go pay the bank in person. The second side-the cadastre, which accepted the receipts-didn’t check to see if they were real, and the third side is the municipality, which supposedly didn’t know that its lands were being sold without them knowing it. Prosecutors will define the legality of this. However, it’s kind of hard to believe that a small group of people were actually able to steal that much money from the state budget. How did they know that those citizens wanted to buy land? How did they know that the given state property was up for sale? I think that they had some contacts with the municipality and the cadastre. Perhaps Armenian legislators are “to blame” for allowing the cadastre to register the purchase only with a receipt and not let the municipality know. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves and wait to see what the prosecutors have to say.