Serob Harutiunian, who used to run a counterintelligence division in the National Security Service (NSS), his wife and son risk becoming the first persons to lose their assets, worth a combined 485 million drams ($1 million), as a result of a controversial law enacted by the Armenian government last year.
The law allows prosecutors to seek asset forfeiture in case of having “sufficient grounds to suspect” that the market value of an individual’s properties exceeds their “legal income” by at least 50 million drams ($110,000). Courts can allow the nationalization of such assets even if their owners are not found guilty of corruption or other criminal offenses.
A spokesman for the Office of the Prosecutor-General, Gor Abrahamian, told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service on Tuesday that the Harutiunian family’s assets, including an expensive apartment in downtown Yerevan, caught the law-enforcement agency’s attention when it was conducting a separate criminal investigation in early 2020.
Harutiunian was accused at the time of leaking to an Armenian newspaper the fact that then Minister for Territorial Administration Suren Papikian had spent a year in prison for stabbing his commander during his compulsory military service. Papikian, who is now the country’s deputy prime minister, publicly urged law-enforcement authorities to find out who publicized “the secret information relating to my private life.”
The NSS colonel was eventually cleared of the charges but still lost his job. He and his family members will now have to prove the legality of their holdings in the court. The prosecutors filed a relevant lawsuit on Monday.
The law in question allows an out-of-court settlement of such cases which would require suspects to hand over 75 percent of their assets to the state.
According to Abrahamian, the prosecutors hope to cut such deals with about a dozen other individuals also suspected of illegal enrichment. They include Vladimir Gasparian, Armenia’s national police chief from 2011-2018, Arman Sahakian, the former head of a government agency on privatization, and a niece of former President Serzh Sarkisian.
Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian has repeatedly portrayed the asset forfeiture mechanism as a major anti-corruption measure that will help his administration recover “wealth stolen from the people.” Opposition figures have condemned it as unconstitutional and accused Pashinian of planning a far-reaching “redistribution of assets” to cement his hold on power.