No One Bought That Ticket from Their Relative's Firm. Grigoryan on Avinyan's Flight Ticket

I was not even part of that delegation to know when Mr. Avinyan boarded, when he took off, or when I should have noticed something or not. This was stated by Yerevan Deputy Mayor Suren Grigoryan in a conversation with journalists regarding the ticket prices for Tigran Avinyan's visit to the USA.

“Here’s the thing: our opposition partners and the media have raised an issue regarding the expensive ticket Mr. Mayor took to the USA. The Mayor said that once he learned what the ticket cost, he considered the criticism to be objective and responded. What more do you want the Mayor to do?” said Grigoryan.

In response to the question of whether he would have known that it was an expensive ticket if there hadn’t been a commotion, he noted: “It is not as if any arbitrary employee just buys a ticket from their favorite place. There is an appropriate system in place through which these tickets are acquired. In this case, no procedural violations occurred. It is not that someone went and bought this ticket from their relative's firm; rather, it was bought urgently, there was that price which is not justified, and the Mayor expressed his position on it.”

It should be noted that the delegation led by the Mayor of Yerevan spent the last week of November in Los Angeles. According to the city hall, a total of 26 million 148 thousand drams was allocated from the state budget for the entire trip. Of this, 12.5 million was spent on tickets. The mayor's business class ticket alone cost 7 million 650 thousand drams. About five million was spent on eight tickets for the other members of the delegation.

Additionally, it was mentioned that the Mayor of Yerevan had announced yesterday that he was shocked by the flight costs to the USA and would fully reimburse it on his own.