The findings of the investigation jointly conducted by Civilnet.am and the international Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) suggest that the party led by Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian violated Armenia’s campaign finance rules enacted by itself.
In particular, it emerged that many of its ostensible donors are unaware of large amounts of money contributed on their behalf to Civil Contract ahead of local elections held in various Armenian regions in 2022.
The party claims to have raised about 170 million drams ($420,000) for those polls from 140 persons, the vast majority of them its own election candidates. Civilnet interviewed 31 such individuals and found that 15 of them categorically deny making any campaign donations.
“Others avoided answering or said they do not remember, and some said they are too busy to answer the question,” the Armenian media outlet said in an extensive article published on Thursday.
The interviewees included Serob Avetisian, a member of the local council of a community in the southern Ararat province. Civil Contract records show that he donated 1.5 million drams ($3,700) to the party. When asked whether he really did so, Avetisian said, “No, you are mistaken.”
Meline Sukiasian, a former council member from the northern Lori province, is shown having contributed as much as 3 million drams. “I could not have transferred that much money simply because I didn’t have it,” she told the investigating reporters. The latter also found other “suspicious patterns.”
“In ten towns of Armenia, at least ten local council candidates transferred exactly the same amount of money on the same day,” wrote Civilnet. “In 26 cases, donations accounted for at least half of the donors' annual income and total savings … Four donations exceeded the maximum legal limit of 2.5 million drams set for a single individual donation.”
“While working on the report, I came to the conclusion that Civil Contract used an organized and perhaps illicit mechanism to ensure donations to the party,” Mkrtich Karapetian, a co-author of the article, told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service.
Armenia - The ruling Civil Contract party holds a concgress in Yerevan, October 29, 2022.
“It’s clear that this was a totally illegal operation,” said Vardine Grigorian, an election expert with the Vanadzor-based Helsinki Citizens’ Assembly. “Making donations on behalf of other persons is a practice punishable by criminal law.”
Grigorian suggested that this was done to cover up the real origin of the money raised by Pashinian’s party. Karapetian similarly said it might have been secretly financed by “some oligarchs.”
The cap on political donations is the result of a campaign finance bill which Pashinian’s government pushed through the Armenian parliament in 2021. The bill also banned businesses from financing election campaigns. This was supposed to separate business from politics, something which Pashinian promised to do when he came to power in 2018.
Critics believe that Civil Contract arranged the shady donations exposed by the Civilnet/OCCRP investigation in order to circumvent the legal restrictions. Neither the ruling party nor the government reacted to it as of Friday evening.
In late January, Infocom.am raised similar questions about lavish campaign donations received by the party in the run-up to last September’s municipal elections in Yerevan. Civil Contract claimed to have raised 506.5 million drams ($1.25 million) for its election campaign.
The investigative publication revealed that the bulk of that sum was generated by donations ranging from 1 million to 2.5 million drams. It said that their nominal contributors included presumably non-rich people linked to senior government officials and businesspeople as well as ordinary residents of Yerevan who could hardly afford such payments. Many of those residents claimed to be unaware of the hefty sums wired to Pashinian’s party on their behalf.
Pashinian declined to explain those suspicious donations when he was asked about them in the parliament last month. He denied any lack of financial transparency within his party. Meanwhile, Armenian prosecutors refused to launch a criminal investigation into the Infocom report, saying that they found no evidence of financial irregularities committed by Civil Contract.