“Haykakan Zhamanak” suggests that despite the speculation that the Russian leadership has prohibited the country’s ethnic Armenian businessmen to make investments in Armenia it has not found at least one such businessman who would confirm that. “It is not difficult to guess where that speculation comes from. During the days of the revolution representatives of the already former government spared no effort to make an impression of having the Kremlin’s backing in order to stop the revolution and shore up their positions. A group of Russia-based Armenian businessmen, who had managed to establish some times with Russian political elites, were helping them with that. That help, however, in no way thwarted the course of the revolution, and the same group is currently trying to economically sabotage the current government,” the paper writes.
On the same subject “Zhoghovurd” reports, citing its own sources, that Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian’s meeting with ethnic Armenian businessmen in Moscow went not quite smoothly. “Those who gathered there were mainly businessmen tied to the former government in different ways, businessmen who did not feel quite comfortable working with Armenia’s new government. Many of them attended the meeting as observers. Some in private conversations with each other said that they would no longer invest in Armenia because they feared the new Armenian government would cause them additional headache – they don’t want to make investments facing the prospect of being put behind bars,” the paper says.
“If the Civil Contract party wins a majority, then I am against joining it purely for coming to power,” Aram Sargsian, the leader of the Hanrapetutyun party and an ally of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian in the current parliament, told “Zhamanak”, speaking about the prospect of early parliamentary elections. “The issue of the Yelk alliance appears to have been closed, and the sides involved know all too well that it is dictated by the political situation. Regardless of the different personal and political motivations of the participants of the alliance, the logic of domestic and external political realities makes it more important not to preserve the Yelk alliance, which was a mechanism formed within the logic of the former political configuration, but to form a new logic and a new system corresponding to the new situation,” the paper writes.
(Tigran Avetisian)