It is about one month that the director of Nairit company Vahan Melkonyan is not in Armenia.
During this month he paid a couple of short visits to Armenia, met with the prime minister and minister of energy and left for Moscow again.
According to our information, the director has left for Moscow to negotiate on attracting new borrowings to save the factory which can hardly survive. Instead of helping they told him that the company has a lot of debts and has not done anything to cover these debts during the past one year. Mr. Melkonyan tried to convince the representatives of the CIS intergovernmental bank and the Russian Central Bank that everything is OK in the factory, they are slowly covering the debts for gas and electricity, and if they receive a borrowing for one more time, they will be able to export their products to markets. This time they did not trust Mr. Melkonyan’s assurances, and as the depot manager of the chemical factory Hranush Meloyan says currently a commission of the CIS intergovernmental bank consisting of six people is checking up the activities of the factory to find out how the huge money they have provided has been spent. H. Meloyan also assures that the director and deputy directors of the factory have embezzled the property and incomes of this factory during many years.
Jilbert Muradyan, member of the commission on production issues of the RA Public Chamber says that it is a long time that he is familiar with the Nairit company and assures that the factory’s debt for electricity has reached 3,4 million dollars and the debt for gas – 2 million dollars. J. Muradyan has also found out that the factory owes a lot of money to the Yerevan HES under the control of the ministry of energy. He says that this debt exceeds $26 million. In addition to this debt the company is collecting a lot of credit obligations year by year. Mr. Muradyan says the Nairit has collected $270-300 million and says that with this money they could have built five such factories. We tried to get some explanations concerning these debts from the factory. The head of the PR department of the company Anush Harutyunyan said that she could not give us any information how much debt the Nairit has at present. “I can’t say that now. We are calculating it now and I don’t have such information. But I don’t think we have so much debt. If so, the factory would not be able to work generally. If there was information about our financial policy, I would think that it could be possible as there might have been outflow of information, which is close to the reality. But when people are sitting in their places and speaking of such money, I don’t think it is real.”A. Harutyunyan approved the fact that the director of the company had been out of the country for about 25 days. “He is in Moscow with official visit but we do not know exactly what the purpose of his visit is. We will inform about this after he returns to Armenia,” she said. As for the inspections in the factory, A. Harutyunyan assured that there are no inspections currently and no one is checking up the factory. We asked her when the factory will work again and whether they had covered the electricity and gas debts. “The factory had to be working as everything is ready for that. But it does not work now and I don’t know anything about the reasons. I can’t say whether the debts are covered or no. The only thing I know is that these debts are slowly being covered. Even though the factory is not working, the employees are getting their salaries. Even we feel shame for that because the workers are getting paid for doing nothing. No one has been fired. Now we are looking for the most optimal solution of operating the factory, after which we will work again,” says A. Harutyunyan.