Proposal to Allocate 185 Million Drams to Penitentiary Service Removed from Government Agenda Due to Fraud Allegations

The newly appointed Minister of Justice, Rustam Badasyan, presented a proposal during today’s government session to allocate 185 million 61 thousand drams to the Penitentiary Service of the Ministry of Justice. He informed that the issue had been discussed with the Acting Head of the State Oversight Service, Argishti Karamians.

“The latter sees a problem with the adoption of this new proposal, as certain frauds have been discovered,” said Rustam Badasyan.

Argishti Karamians explained that during an examination conducted within the Penitentiary Service, it was recorded that the renovations and construction works initiated as a result of the monetary funds allocated by the government decision dated November 22, 2018, were implemented in violation of the established design and budgeting forms.

He further noted that violations were also found regarding the fulfillment of certain provisions of the contractual obligations.

“It has become clear that the builders provided services to the Penitentiary Service that were neither of adequate quality nor timely, which has provided grounds for the violations recorded by the State Oversight Service to be included in the report summarizing the examination. We have a situation where funding was allocated by a previous decision for these works, and they were completed with deficiencies, and some part was not completed at all. With this proposal, we want to allocate a bit more funds than before for the same works. We suggest postponing the discussion of this proposal,” said Argishti Karamians.

Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan inquired whether payments had been made for those services. The acting head of the State Oversight Service informed that 95 percent of the payments had been made, however, they had not been transferred to the companies conducting the works and were in a frozen state.