It gave no reason for the decision approved during a cabinet meeting chaired by the prime minister on July 11. A government statement said only that the electric and hybrid cars will be purchased from a local dealership representing the Swedish carmaker Volvo.
Three of them will be used by high-ranking government officials, the statement said without naming them or their positions. Nor did it specify the recipients of the other government limousines.
A spokeswoman for Armenia’s Committee for the State Property Management, which will handle the procurement, also declined to disclose the list of those officials, saying that it “may change before the end of the year.”
Even the Armenian Ministry of Finance sought an answer to this question in its written comments on the July 11 decision submitted to the prime minister’s office beforehand. It also remains unclear whether the government will decommission as many other limousines that are currently in service.
Varuzhan Hoktanian, the programs director at Armenia’s leading anticorruption watchdog, called the acquisition a “luxury” and criticized the lack of transparency surrounding it.
“Any political force that comes to power gets a taste of power some time later and starts to forget what they said when they were not in power,” Hoktanian told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service.
Pashinian decried what he called a disproportionately large number of government cars in Armenia when he was an opposition parliamentarian prior to coming to power in 2018. He said that there must be no more than 35 limousines reserved for the country’s highest-ranking officials.
The overall number of government cars does not seem to have decreased during his six-year rule. Moreover, Pashinian has been criticized for buying additional expensive cars for his and his family members’ security detail.