Armenian Minister Accused of Misappropriating State Vehicles: What Investigators Are Saying

The Prosecutor General's office is investigating a report by investigative journalists on whether the Minister of Internal Affairs of Artsakh and his associates have misappropriated around two dozen vehicles from the ministry's fleet. If the suspicions are confirmed, law enforcement will initiate a criminal case. This was reported by 'Azatutyun'.

According to Sevada Ghazaryan, a journalist from the Fact-Checking Platform who authored the disclosure, 'Karen Sargsyan, while being the Minister of Internal Affairs, changed the names of vehicles under the ministry’s jurisdiction to those of his acquaintances before leaving Artsakh, transported them to Armenia, moved them to an area he owns, and simply hid them.'

The initial source of information came from acquaintances who accidentally spotted several vehicles belonging to the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Artsakh at a car wash. The journalist later visited the site and noticed that those vehicles were covered with a tarp, and approaching them was prohibited. The suspicions intensified during a second visit to the car wash under the pretext of getting a wash.

“During our second try at washing the cars, we managed to take hidden footage, and we then tried to compare the information we gathered from the footage with that available about the vehicles from Artsakh, including transit plates, and we aimed to see under whose name they were registered. The picture started to clarify, centering around the figure of the Minister of Internal Affairs, Karen Sargsyan,” said the journalist.

Additionally, from the Cadastre, it was determined that the vehicles brought from Artsakh to Armenia are parked in an area that has belonged to Karen Sargsyan since 2015. “During our latest visit, when we tried to take open footage, once again the employee did not allow us, and we left our phone numbers so that the owner of the area could call us, so we could understand who it is. This was on the evening of the 15th, and by the morning of the 16th, we found that the vehicles were no longer on-site, meaning they had all disappeared overnight,” the journalist noted.

This is privatization of state property that no longer exists; who should pursue it, who should protest against this illegality, the journalist questions, although he does not rule out that the minister could have appropriated the vehicles with honest intentions to prevent them from falling into Azerbaijani hands. However, there is one circumstance: “Hiding them, moving them again after we became aware and not allowing us to approach raises suspicion about the minister's benevolent intentions, especially given that he took them and is keeping them on his personal territory, particularly since our Ministry of Internal Affairs is not aware of this matter. In other words, no proposal has been made until now—more than three months have passed, and they remain unaware and have not received any proposals,” Sevada Ghazaryan observed.

Karen Sargsyan could have donated the property to the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Armenia, stated Daniel Ioannissian, the head of the Union of Informed Citizens. He mentioned that there had previously been a precedent when a rescuer from Artsakh, upon reaching Armenia, donated the equipment he had at hand to Armenia.

“As a taxpayer of Armenia, the loans taken by the authorities of Artsakh are being covered by my taxes; the strange loans taken by the authorities of Artsakh are being paid out of the Armenian budget. At the very least, I would like to know that the property that has come to Armenia belongs to the Armenian state and cannot become someone’s personal property,” Ioannissian said.