The company called Impex went to court after the official, Vazgen Harutiunian, annulled in 2023 its contract for the delivery and placement of new road signs in the Armenian capital. He said that Impex failed to provide a 10-year bank guarantee in accordance with the terms of a tender won by it. The company countered that it could not have produced such a document because it was set up only eight years ago.
Harutiunian called a new tender for the contract despite a subsequent court order that blocked any further bidding pending a verdict on the lawsuit. A law-enforcement agency accused him this week of not complying with the injunction, a charge carrying up to two years in prison. He was suspended by Mayor Tigran Avinian as a result.
In a Facebook post, Harutiunian strongly denied any wrongdoing. He claimed to have been formally notified about the injunction after initiating the new bidding process.
“The Yerevan municipality, the Transport Department headed by me has acted exclusively within the framework of the law,” said the official. “All the documents confirming this have already been provided.”
The Impex founder, Mikael Shakhnazarian, disputed the claim on Thursday.
“That [notification] happened much earlier than the announcement of the second tender,” he told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service.
Several other senior municipality officials have already been prosecuted on different corruption charges since Avinian was controversially elected mayor in October 2023. They include the head of the municipal administration’s department on public utilities, Arsen Karoyan, who was arrested last spring for alleged abuse of power.
In July 2024, investigators arrested the head of Yerevan’s northern Arabkir district, Aram Azatian, on bribery charges denied by him. Four months later, they raided the administration of the city’s central Kentron district and detained four local officials on similar charges.