A handcuffed Tsarukian was able to briefly talk to reporters as he was escorted out of an Investigative Committee building in Yerevan to face court hearings on his pre-trial arrest. He was greeted by hundreds of supporters who gathered outside the building.
“The accusation is fabricated, it’s a bubble, there is nothing in it,” he said. “We will prove that by 100 percent. Everything will be cleared up.”
The arrest followed a 12-hour search conducted at his villa by law-enforcement authorities on Monday. The latter also raided dozens of companies owned by Tsarukian and disrupted their operations in a crackdown widely linked to Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian’s repeated pledges to jail and “dispossess” his political foes.
Armenia’s Investigative Committee claims that Tsarukian led a “criminal group” that misappropriated $22 million worth of fuel, transport equipment and other goods supplied by his Iranian business partners from 2022-2024. His lawyers say he himself was defrauded by the Iranians and alerted the law-enforcement authorities about that.
“We clearly substantiated in the court that these individuals themselves owe Tsarukyan money and that they have not returned it, even though they had undertaken to do so by 2026,” one of the lawyers, Yerem Sargsian, said right after a court hearing on his client’s arrest.
However, the Yerevan court allowed investigators to hold Tsarukian in detention for the next two months. The defense lawyers said they will appeal against the decision made by the same judge who sanctioned the pre-trial arrest of a key Tsarukian ally in the run-up to last month’s disputed parliamentary elections.
Tsarukian's arrest sparked a wave of condemnations from the country’s leading opposition forces. The largest of them, the Strong Armenia alliance led by billionaire Samvel Karapetian, said it is part of the “ongoing mass political persecution in the country.”
“The main goal of the ongoing repression by the current authorities is to silence opposition forces,” read a statement released by it overnight.
In a separate statement, eight other opposition parties said Pashinian is keen to “neutralize and effectively behead the opposition.” They said his “unprecedented repressive campaign” will not stop opposition efforts to topple him.
Pashinian pledged to jail Tsarukian, Karapetian and another top opposition leader, former President Robert Kocharian, before and after disputed parliamentary elections held on June 7. His critics say these statements prove that law-enforcement authorities are acting on his illegal orders.
The Investigative Committee has yet to shed light on separate criminal cases attributed by it to Monday’s raids on dozens of companies making up Tsarukian’s Multi Group conglomerate. Investigators sealed off the offices of the largest of those firms, notably a cement plant and a brandy distillery.
They also shut down Tsarukian’s private zoo located inside his vast compound just north of Yerevan. The committee claimed that three lions, one tiger and other wild animals were kept there as a result of “illegal hunting.” A spokeswoman for Tsarukian insisted that he had legal permits for all those animals.