Great success: the Armenian government is establishing an institution in charge of discovering the interests of officials. In other words, this institution is established for the purpose of discovering the interests of MPs, government officials and others and not to let them be involved in business activities.
The government is so sensitive to this issue that all headlines of this news and initiative on part of the government are entitled as the following: OFFICIALS SHOULD NOT DO BUSINESS. This has been established by the Constitution too and it is like the Armenian tale hero Brave Nazar who says that the mountains should be higher than valleys. However, this initiative will result in a number of legislative changes. During the recent session the government approved the bill on amending the criminal code, the laws on civic service and registration of the properties and incomes of physical persons. It is not clear yet what the amendments are because the bills have not been presented to the parliament yet. The only source of information concerning this initiative so far is PM Tigran Sargsyan’s announcement and the press release of the government, which specifically writes the following: “The adoption of this law is a serious development because we are adopting an institution of discovering interests in Armenia. It means that this law establishes real mechanisms not to allow officials, MPs and ministers do business, to discover their interests and not to let them solve their problems with the help of undiscovered agents, and it will enable the society to control over this process and make sure that this Constitutional norm works.” It means that they confess that this Constitutional norm has not worked in Armenia so far. However it is not so interesting to criticize this failure because all the provisions of the Constitution have been violated till now.
It is a fact that there are no real mechanisms to punish officials involved in business activities and it would be logical to fill this gap. But the name of this initiative is really funny: whose interests will be discovered and by whom? Is there any Armenian citizen who does not know what businesses officials have? If you are not sure you can take any taxi and ask the driver and he will tell you who is who.
By the way, by coincidence recently the media focused on another initiative on part of the government. In particular, the initiative according to which the government will have representatives in different businesses the previous fiscal year income of which was more than 4 billion dram to monitor their activities. We have covered this topic and pointed out the negative sides of this initiative. Two days ago by accident I saw the session of the NA standing committee on economic affairs. They were interviewing MPs, whom I had never seen before (Alexan Petrosyan and Karen Vardanyan). They were criticizing this initiative and they were right. It was a good opportunity to discover interests on practice and you can easily propose such deal and watch to see the reaction of MPs in order to understand who is opposed to such initiative. On the other hand, most of the MPs don’t even read draft laws and may easily vote for any bill even if such bills bring them to bankruptcy. In a word, the best mechanism is talking to taxi drivers. However, we will follow the process and will inform of any changes and new mechanisms proposed by the government. The prime minister has promised to organize discussions on this topic to make the discussions transparent and available to the society as well. Eventually, the government reached its goal and now it has what to show on TV and imitate that they are working so that the people would see them and think that they have a great government which is making best efforts for the sake of effective management in the country. But in fact after the parliamentary sessions the government officials (the officials of the government which has adopted the initiative of establishing an institute of discovering interests) will go out and smoke cigarettes, talk to each other (certainly they will talk about state interests), will sit in their luxurious cars with state plate numbers and will hold each other’s hands and go to some restaurant to have a party and meanwhile discover each others’ interests. They will also drink a toast to the successful implementation of the past initiatives as well… Even they will drink for the initiative which had to make a revolution in their souls and hearts. Then the bill will be sent to the parliament and will be discussed by the commission and the members Ashot Aghababyan, Tigran Arzakantsyan, Ashot Arsenyan, Alexan Petrosyan, Karen and Miachael Vardanyans to find out whether this law will be effective and will discover interests. And if they feel it’s good, they will also make some recommendations for the sake of the state interests.
And when times goes and people forget this initiative as they forgot the promises to punish high rank officials, a new initiative will come up with a bright name and headline to blow the minds of people. One should not suspect that this may happen because our government is very talented in working out such useless empty initiatives to blow the minds of people.