Officers of Armenia’s Investigative Committee spent several hours searching the office of Armen Charchian, the executive director of the Izmirlian Medical Center. They confiscated his computer as a result. The committee declined to comment on the search. Nor did it arrest or indict anyone as of Friday evening.
Charchian’s lawyer, Erik Andreasian, said the hospital was raided as part of a criminal investigation into tax evasion and money laundering formally launched last October. In his words, the investigators claim that from 2015-2025 the hospital management bought medical supplies at inflated prices from companies linked to senior clergymen not named by them so far.
Andreasian said he is not allowed to give further details of the case. He said the fact that the investigators waited for four months before searching his client’s office suggests that it has to do with “what has been happening around the church lately.”
The lawyer clearly referred to Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian’s efforts to depose Catholicos Garegin II, the supreme head of the church. Ten Armenian archbishops and bishops have been prosecuted since June on various charges denied by them. Two of them are held in detention while two others are under house arrest.
Father Hovannes Torgomian, a priest supervising the Izmirlian Medical Center, rejected the tax evasion claims as a “complete, insolent lie.”
“This is yet another manifestation of the anti-church campaign,” Torgomian told reporters after the search. “We expected them, and, what is more, we expected them here much earlier.”
There was no immediate reaction from Garegin’s office. The Mother See has repeatedly condemned the criminal proceedings against the bishops as politically motivated.
Charchian, the hospital chief, is a prominent surgeon who was elected to the Armenian parliament in 2021 on the opposition Hayastan alliance’s ticket. Right after those elections he was arrested on charges of pressuring hospital personnel to vote for the alliance. He denied the charges. A court in Yerevan gave Charchian a suspended three-and-a-half year prison sentence in February 2024.