Minister Ordered to Vacate Nursing Home Building for Urgent Sale

Yerevan.Today has learned that yet another absurd decision was made in the Government last night, albeit at a verbal level. The urgent order is to vacate the nursing home in Nor Nork, transfer the elderly quietly to another location, and reduce the staff in order to hastily put state property up for sale.

It is believed that these abnormal emotions erupted in the Prime Minister's cabinet. According to information received by Yerevan.Today, a call was made from the Prime Minister's office to the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs late yesterday evening, with an instruction something like this: "You have ten days to empty the Nor Nork nursing home building at any cost. You have ten days; quickly prepare a project to bring to the government so we can proceed with the unification. This building must be put up for sale; we don't have time."

Several scenarios regarding the sale of state buildings and plunder have also been disclosed to Yerevan.Today beyond the governmental corridors. But this one is particularly notable because a part of the night-time emotional outburst in the governmental building concerning the Nor Nork building turned into a morning order for the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs.

According to our sources, this morning, the Minister of Social Affairs Mesrop Arakelyan called his deputy Tatev Stepanyan before the light was on and instructed him to prepare a project to vacate the Nor Nork boarding house within a few hours so that he could take it to the governmental building in the evening.

Why, how... The deputy minister's bewildered questions went unanswered; instead, the minister provided the financier with some suggestions regarding the motivational justifications for the vacating of the Nor Nork nursing home. "The dissolution of the Nor Nork nursing home should be framed as if we are merging it with the number 1 nursing home for the sake of cost reduction. As a result, one administrative collective will take care of 200+200 elderly in the same building," this is how they agreed to formulate the outputs for dissolving the Nor Nork nursing home.

Under the order from the government, the project had to be presented as a state document by 6 PM today, declaring the two buildings of the nursing home as unsuitable and justifying their expropriation.

It should be emphasized that there have been no prior plans for merging nursing homes and expropriating property; there are no reasons for this now or during previous administrations. On the contrary, merging two separate 200-capacity nursing homes actually violates the standards set by regulatory acts for nursing homes and represents an excessive concentration for the target group, contrary to the policies being pursued in the sector.

This is despite the fact that previous administrations and the current one envisioned their policies in this area exclusively through offloading programs, whereas today they are doing completely the opposite.

Why... The answer is clear: embezzlement at the expense of administrative resources. It is not ruled out that, under the threat of pressures from opposition forces outside, the last chances for embezzlement within the government are being exploited to satisfy the business appetites of some officials.

The fact is that the idea of selling the state property of the Nor Nork nursing home is a completely new situational decision—made on the spot, without justifying its causes or providing preliminary procedural safeguards. It should be noted that the expropriation of the nursing home building was not in the list of properties scheduled for disposal this year; we did not find this name in the government decisions.

It is important to note that the Nor Nork nursing home is a shelter for 200 homeless and helpless elderly people and has always been considered one of the best nursing homes—not only due to improved internal conditions but also because of its location. The primary advantage of the Nor Nork nursing home has been its location on a hill in Nor Nork, where the air is clean, the building has a spacious area with a significant green zone, and two semi-structures with a usable area of 4,000 square meters. This location, according to long-time sector veterans, was specifically chosen during the Soviet years so that the elderly would have a comfortable home in a high position in the city, with clean air and a green island nearly in the center of Yerevan. In contrast, the number 1 nursing home is located in the Victory village on the outskirts of Yerevan and has 200 beneficiaries and 40 service staff.