Criminal Prosecution Against Seyran Ohanyan in Zorakhek Case Terminated on Grounds of Justification

"Do you remember the Zorakhek case which was being investigated by the Anti-Corruption Committee? In this case, Mr. Seyran Ohanyan was accused of mismanagement of property worth 1,046,400,000 AMD and faced charges under the third part of Article 179 of the Criminal Code," wrote lawyer Karen Mejlumyan on his Facebook page.

"According to the decision dated 10.08.2023 by the supervising prosecutor A. Muradyan, the criminal prosecution against Mr. Ohanyan has been terminated on the grounds that he did not commit the alleged act. By the way, the same prosecutor did not approve the investigator's indictment back in May 2021. However, the authorities brought baseless charges against Mr. Seyran Ohanyan, subjecting him to four years of unjust criminal prosecution and applying a measure of restraint of not leaving the country, solving some problems for themselves. One of the most primitive of these is that Mr. Ohanyan is a member of the National Assembly and also a member of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO). There have been multiple invitations for Mr. Ohanyan to participate in the CSTO PA's permanent committee meetings, but due to the applied measure of restraint, he was unable to attend. The investigator even rejected a request to open the border for a few days to participate in the CSTO PA. This was particularly important after the 44-day war, as Mr. Ohanyan, as a participant in the war and a geopolitical figure, needed the opportunity to present to his CSTO PA colleagues the real situation regarding the security of Artsakh and Armenia and to explain that the CSTO should be more active in fulfilling its contractual obligations. But this was not necessary for the authorities," the lawyer wrote.

It should be noted that Seyran Ohanyan was involved as a suspect in a criminal case under investigation by the Special Investigative Service of the Republic of Armenia on suspicion of mismanagement of property valued at 1 billion AMD. The charges against Seyran Ohanyan, former chairman of the Public Services Regulatory Commission Robert Nazaryan, and several other officials pertain to the criminal case concerning the abuse of official powers in the process of privatization of the company Zorakhek LLC, linked to the former Ambassador of Armenia to the Vatican, Mikael Minasian, the son-in-law of the third president of Armenia, Serzh Sargsyan.