Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian’s government set up the Armenian National Interests Fund (ANIF) in 2019 in an effort to only attract foreign investors but also promote Armenian exports and support local businesses. ANIF clearly failed in that mission, leading the government to liquidate it last August. A year before that decision, law-enforcement authorities launched a corruption investigation into the fund’s four-year activities that reportedly cost taxpayers at least 10.7 billion drams ($27.3 million).
The Investigative Committee told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service on Tuesday that nobody has been detained or charged by it so far. It declined to give other details of the probe.
“The investigation is either not progressing or there is no information about it,” said Artur Sakunts, a veteran human rights activist and member of an anti-corruption advisory body headed by Pashinian.
“We are dealing with inaction in relation to the failure to solve a crime of this level and scope,” he said.
Varuzhan Hoktanian, the head of Armenia’s leading anti-corruption watchdog affiliated with Transparency International, said the slow pace of the investigation has fueled suspicions that ANIF’s activities were tainted with high-level corruption.
“The longer this case drags on, the more these suspicions will indicate a classic case of grand corruption,” he said.
The lack of concrete results in the ANIF probe, Hoktanian went on, is a further sign that even during Pashinian’s seven-year rule “political expediency” has determined the outcomes of high-profile criminal cases in Armenia. The activist suggested that members of Pashinian’s political team are not prosecuted without his permission.
One of those loyalists, Yerevan Mayor Tigran Avinian, headed ANIF’s board of directors from 2019-2023. It remains unclear whether he has been questioned by the investigators.
It emerged last month that an ANIF subsidiary invested in 2023 over 1.5 billion drams ($3.8 million) in an obscure company run by a friend of Avinian’s wife. The company received the funding just eight days after being registered in a tax haven in the U.S. state of Delaware. It appears to have halted its operations since then.
Although Pashinian claims to have eliminated “systemic” corruption and created a level playing field for all businesses, no large-scale Western or other foreign investment projects have been launched in Armenia during his tenure. ANIF’s most notable achievement was a 2021 deal with a company from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) that pledged to build Armenia’s first massive solar power plant. The $174 million project was subsequently put on hold for still unknown reasons, however.
ANIF also co-owned, together with the UAE’s Air Arabia, the Fly Arna airline which the Armenian government declared the new “national carrier” in 2021. Fly Arna stopped its flights in January 2024 before being stripped of its operating license and declared bankrupt.