Former speaker of the National Assembly Arthur Baghdasaryan’s uncle Samson Baghdasaryan was released from prison on January 11. Let’s recall that Samson Baghdasaryan was head of the territorial organization of the Kanaker-Zeytun community; he was arrested and imprisoned last year in light of the well-known “Cadastre Case” when a group of people had dealt with phony promissory notes and had caused 1.5 billion drams worth of damage to the state.
S. Baghdasaryan was accused based on the third part of the 308th article of the Armenian Criminal Code: “anyone who oppositely takes advantage of his official position or doesn’t fulfill his duties based on speculative, personal or group interests that have hurt the rights and legal interests of persons, organizations, society and the state and have caused serious consequences, is penalized with two-six years in prison”. On January 11, the first instance court of the Kanaker-Zeytun communities had sentenced S. Baghdasaryan to three years in prison; however the sentencing wasn’t fulfilled because in July 2006, Robert Kocharyan had signed an amnesty order in light of the 15th anniversary of the independence of Armenia. S. Baghdasaryan was able to escape from prison, but he wasn’t able to spend all the money that he had stolen. “168 Hours” found out from the Prosecutor General’s Office of Armenia that during the preliminary investigation, it was revealed that as a result of the illegal activities of the Cadastre organization of the Kanaker-Zeytun community, 34 citizens had lost and 260 million drams hadn’t entered the budget. During the legal proceedings, 168 million drams was returned. It is not excluded that some of the money had been returned when the case was being investigated in court. We found out from the press service of the appeal court that that organization still hasn’t redeemed 35 million drams and eight citizens still haven’t received their money. According to our sources, Samson Baghdasaryan recently sold one of his stores located on Abovyan Street so that he can partly compensate for the damage that he has caused to the citizens.