The State Oversight Service (SOS) began auditing the municipality’s financial operations last December just days after the city council controlled by Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian’s party ousted Marutian.
The SOS claimed last week to have found evidence of various “violations” worth a combined 8.5 billion drams ($20 million). It asked law-enforcement authorities to investigate the findings of the audit, raising the possibility of criminal charges against Marutian.
Speaking in the RFE/RL studio in Yerevan on Monday, the head of the SOS, Romanos Petrosian, insisted that the audit and the resulting allegations are not politically motivated. He argued that his agency is also inspecting many other state bodies.
“It’s not that the SOS can arbitrarily ignore obedient [officials] and audit disobedient ones,” said Petrosian.
The official, who is a senior member of the ruling Civil Contract party, said he believes that at least some of the alleged irregularities resulted from “corruption schemes.”
“But Hayk Marutian did not govern the city of Yerevan on his own, and [all municipal officials] from junior specialists to the mayor exercised their powers,” he went on. “So this must not be politicized.”
Responding on the SOS’s allegations late last week, Marutian said through a spokesman that he welcomes “efforts to increase the efficiency of resource management” in central and local government bodies. He did not comment further.
The ex-mayor commented scathingly on July 1 after several pro-government websites alleged that the Yerevan municipality embezzled or misused otherwise as much as $40 million on his watch. He suggested that the allegations are aimed at discouraging him from participating in the next municipal elections.
Marutian, 45, is a former TV comedian who actively participated in the “velvet revolution” that brought Pashinian to power in May 2018. Pashinian chose the popular entertainer to lead his bloc’s list of candidates in the last Yerevan elections held in September 2018
Relations between the two men deteriorated after the 2020 war over Nagorno-Karabakh. Marutian increasingly distanced himself from the prime minister’s political team and pointedly declined to support it during snap parliamentary elections held in June 2021.