The Armenian government’s State Revenue Committee (SRC) reported on Thursday that it collected about 20 billion drams ($51 million) in various taxes from the company called Mobile Center in the first quarter of 2024. The figure represents a more than threefold increase from the same period of last year.
The national natural gas distribution network owned by Russia’s Gazprom is the second in the SRC’s first-quarter tax rankings, having paid over 18 billion drams in taxes. It is followed by the Zangezur Copper-Molybdenum Combine, Armenia’s largest mining enterprise controlled by other Russian investors.
Mobile Center belongs to the family of Samvel Aleksanian, one of the country’s wealthiest entrepreneurs who has wide-ranging business interests. It has never topped the list of leading Armenian taxpayers before.
Like many other Armenian firms, the cellphone retailer appears to have strongly benefited from Western bans on exports of various goods to Russia imposed after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Many such Western-made products, notably cars and consumer electronics, have since been re-exported to Russia from Armenia.
This explains why Armenia’s exports to Russia tripled in 2022 and doubled in January-August 2023. Russia accounted for more than 40 percent of those exports worth $8.4 billion last year.
“Russia is simply unable to buy those goods [directly,] and so Mobile Center has become one of the re-exporting companies,” said Suren Parsian, an Armenian economist.