The former director general and three other senior executives of the Metsamor nuclear power plant will go on trial soon on charges of serious fraud, Armenia’s National Security Service (NSS) announced on Thursday.
The powerful security agency said Metsamor’s ex-director, Gagik Markosian, his two former deputies and procurement manager stand accused of embezzling almost 784 million drams ($1.6 million) while administering procurements commissioned by the plant.
“The crime has been solved and the 783.586 million-dram damage inflicted by it on the state has been fully reversed,” read an NSS statement. “The criminal case has been sent to court along with the indictment.”
The statement gave no other details of the case. It was not immediately clear whether all four men have confessed to the “particularly large-scale embezzlement” alleged by the NSS.
Markosian resigned as Metsamor chief executive in December 2014 following the arrest of Rubik Movsesian, the plant’s commercial director and one of the four men charged in the fraud case.
The NSS did not clarify whether Movsesian or any of the three other suspects is being kept in pre-trial detention at the moment.
The nuclear facility located about 40 kilometers west of Yerevan was designed and built in the 1970s. Its sole functioning reactor generates more than one-third of Armenia’s electricity.