14.5 Million Drams Stolen: Two Employees of Vardenis Social Assistance Agency Arrested

Two employees of the Vardenis social assistance territorial agency have embezzled approximately 14.5 million drams through fraud. Aurora News has been informed by the prosecutor's office that a criminal case has been initiated regarding the illegal receipt of payments from beneficiaries in the service area by the employees of the Vardenis social assistance territorial agency under the Gegharkunik regional administration.

During the pre-investigation, it was specifically revealed that a former employee of the Vardenis social assistance territorial agency demanded and received a particularly large amount of illegal remuneration—5,400,000 drams—through an operator of the Haypost branch during the years 2013-2015. This was in exchange for ensuring that various beneficiaries registered in the same department would continue to receive their entitled benefits and not be removed from the beneficiary list.

Another employee of the same territorial agency also demanded from beneficiaries and received an illegal remuneration of 3,600,000 drams through another operator of the Haypost branch during 2016-2017.

During the investigation, factual data was also obtained indicating that certain employees of the same territorial agency, from 2013 to 2018, entered false information about social insecurity into the Vardenis territorial agency's database without the knowledge of several citizens, thereby registering them in the list of family benefit system beneficiaries.

Based on this, they were included in the list of beneficiaries and family benefit payments were illegally processed in their names, which were delivered monthly by the postal office servicing that specific area of Haypost. As a result, approximately 14,376,000 drams were fraudulently embezzled.

A criminal case was opened on December 10, 2018, based on the collected evidence, by the Vardenis investigative department of the Gegharkunik regional investigative department of the RA Investigative Committee under point 1 of part 3 of article 178 of the RA Criminal Code, which was combined with the aforementioned criminal case.

On December 12, 2018, one former and one current employee of the Vardenis social assistance territorial agency were arrested on suspicion of committing theft of property through fraud on a particularly large scale.

The investigation is ongoing.