Judicial Protection Measures Do Not Work in Armenia: Sanitek's Statement

On October 3, the Mayor of Yerevan officially announced the termination of contracts with waste management operators in the city and sent official notifications to the operators.

The legal team of Sanitek examined the notifications and found that the grounds presented chronologically indicate one thing: from the pre-election period until the moment of contract termination, the primary objective of the municipal authorities has been to damage the operators’ activities by all possible means, ultimately leading to the termination of the contracts.

To avoid overwhelming the public, we will not delve into the legal complexities in this message, but we will highlight one fact that we consider significant in this situation. The analysis of the notifications shows that the Yerevan City Hall could, in fact, unilaterally terminate the contracts at any moment prior to the mayor's announcement, as the legal grounds asserted in the notifications had long existed. However, a pivotal circumstance for the termination of the contract at this moment was the conclusion recently arrived at by the Prosecutor General's Office of Armenia based on information provided by the Yerevan City Hall, which indicated that several violations preceded the signing of contracts between the City Hall and the operators. Moreover, a criminal case has been initiated in this regard.

This creates a situation where the Prosecutor General's Office, in its announcement regarding the initiation of a criminal case, grossly violated the presumption of innocence, and the Mayor of Yerevan, basing his actions solely on the fact of the initiation of a criminal case, took the Prosecutor General’s statement as a final court decision, thereby establishing a violation of the presumption of innocence by terminating the contracts.

It is important to note that in addition to the Yerevan City Hall, the Prosecutor General's Office, and the State Revenue Committee, the Office of the Human Rights Defender has recently joined in imposing financial and technical sanctions against Sanitek by publishing an unprecedented special report on violations of human rights that occurred in a private organization in 2018-2019.

Throughout this entire period, aside from initiating baseless criminal cases, the Prosecutor General's Office and the State Revenue Committee have been preoccupied with the process of depriving the Sanitek company of the opportunity to legally contest their decisions, intentionally failing to appear at court hearings on numerous occasions.

This circumstance gives reason to declare that judicial protection measures do not function in the Republic of Armenia and the state is incapable of ensuring the realization of the right to a fair trial for foreign investors.

In summary, the actions of the Yerevan City Hall, the Government of Armenia, and other involved bodies are regarded by Sanitek as discriminatory and punitive, aimed at expropriating the company, deemed a foreign investor, and confiscating its assets.

As is commonly said in Armenia, nothing happens by chance and no good deed goes unpunished.

Respectfully, the Management of Sanitek