Tsarukian was charged with vote buying and held in detention for a month shortly after demanding Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian’s resignation in 2020. Law-enforcement authorities claimed that he had tried to buy votes for his Prosperous Armenia Party (BHK) ahead of parliamentary elections held in 2017. He strongly denied the accusations before and during his subsequent trial.
A court in Yerevan acquitted Tsarukian but found one of his longtime collaborators, Sedrak Arustamian, guilty of vote buying at the end of the long trial. One of the defense lawyers, Yerem Sargsian, said he is “pleasantly surprised” by Tsarukian’s acquittal despite what he described as prosecutors’ failure to come up with any evidence in support of the charges.
The ruling came less than three months before Armenia’s parliamentary elections in which a new bloc which is being set up by Tsarukian is expected to be one of the main opposition contenders. In recent weeks, senior representatives of Pashinian’s Civil Contract party have signaled concerns that the bloc as well as two other opposition groups led by former President Robert Kocharian and billionaire Samvel Karapetian may collectively win a majority in the new parliament. They have said that the Armenian authorities “will not allow” such an outcome.
In what Tsarukian’s political allies see as a related development, law-enforcement officers raided the 69-year-old tycoon’s private compound outside Yerevan on February 19 as part of a criminal investigation in which he had been questioned as a witness years ago. Tsarukian seems undaunted by the possibility of another criminal case against him.
He was already indicted in December 2025 for selling his bottling plant in Bulgaria for 23 million euros ($26.7 million) despite an Armenian court’s decision to freeze his assets worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Prosecutors moved to confiscate them in late 2023, invoking a controversial law that allows the state to seize money, property and companies deemed to have been acquired illegally. The court issued the injunction at the time pending a ruling on the case.
Tsarukian’s BHK had the second largest group in Armenia’s former parliament. But it failed to win any parliament seats in the last general elections held in June 2021. The tycoon kept a low profile in the following years.