The conflict between “Royal Armenia” and State Customs Committee continues. The company has applied to the economical court to make the customs prices invalid. The representatives of the company say that the customs committee has stated high prices for the coffee they import. And this makes the final price for coffee go up and affects their competition and sustainability in the market. The proceeding took place yesterday at 15:00 and lasted only 15 minutes. Representative of “Royal Armenia” company Gevorg Minasyan made a protest against Judge E. Khundkaryan and the proceedings were delayed.
He presented a document consisted of three pages, where he explained the reason of their protest in details. We will discuss only one thing mentioned in that document: the same judge stopped the application proceedings of the company as of August 24, 2005 (regarding consideration of the customs prices invalid).
The protest letter ends with the following sentence: “It is clear that Judge E. Khundakaryan looks negatively at “Royal Armenia” LLC and is positive to the state customs body, I think that this negative approach of the judge will not let him be fair to us, so please kindly meet our protest”.
Mr. Minasyan is not sure that his application will be accepted and they will appoint a new judge. So why did they protest in the first place? Because they are not sure concerning the fairness of other judges and that they will not do the same as this one. Mr. Minasyan said that they didn’t want to waste their time in court proceedings at all and concerning the protest he said: “With this protest I wanted to show to people that this judge has a negative approach to us with what he did last time”. Anyway, Mr. Minasyan is sure that they are going to win morally: “Everyone understands that if those people could prove their numbers they would do that, but they wouldn’t make this kind of play and then try to do something here”.
Mr. Minasyan is sure that this judge is not fair to them. Concerning the relations of the judge and customs service he said that the customs officials didn’t need any money so it wasn’t difficult for them to do that. Anyway, Mr. Minasyan thinks that the customs service will continue doing things out of the law. According to him they have been struggling against only one thing since 2003: “We want to make the customs service be fair with us and make their activities in accordance with the law. We want to make them not abuse our rights, or at least not to abuse much. Because as I see their traditions and character are stronger than the law”.
In order to be objective to them we must ask the other party about their opinion too. But we couldn’t make contact with Mr. Karapetyan, who represented customs service. By the way, he didn’t agree to be shown on TV either and this makes people suspect more. We wrote in one of our last publications that the representatives of this company had applied to the president and other officials. Mr. Minasyan said that they were going to write new applications and complain and as well as present new facts. As for the previous applications, they haven’t answered to those applications yet. Concerning this Mr. Minasyan said: “To tell you frankly we don’t expect to get answer in this period. These days they are busy with Constitutional referendum works. I hope they will give me an answer after November 27”.
We hope that the court will make a fair decision after the Constitution is adopted by public vote on November 27, because the authorities do everything to make us sure that this new Constitution is going to make the judicial system better. On the other hand there are sentences in the existing Constitution like “all people are equal” and provisions like this, and in this case we can hardly believe that something will change…