Former Armenian President Robert Kocharyan and his eldest son were detained on Tuesday after law enforcement officers searched dozens of locations linked to the family, the country’s Anti-Corruption Committee said. The Prosecutor General’s Office said it had opened a criminal case against Kocharyan, 71, on charges of abuse of authority, bribery and large-scale money laundering, and that four other people were detained alongside him and his son Sedrak.
Investigators say they are examining allegations that state assets were sold to private companies below market value during Kocharyan’s presidency, which ran from 1998 to 2008. The committee said nine other people were named in the case, and that former President Serzh Sargsyan, who served as Kocharyan’s prime minister before holding the presidency himself from 2008 to 2018, also faces charges of abuse of official authority. Sargsyan was summoned to the committee’s headquarters in Yerevan on Tuesday.
Kocharyan leads the Moscow-friendly Armenia Alliance, parliament’s second-largest opposition bloc. Bagrat Mikoyan, who heads his office, called the detentions “yet another attack on President Kocharyan and his family,” adding that the former leader had felt ill afterwards and was taken to hospital. During his time in office, Kocharyan deepened ties with Moscow, signing a declaration of allied partnership with the Kremlin, and he has maintained close personal relations with Vladimir Putin.
The raids came less than a day after Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan clashed in parliament with Kocharyan’s younger son, Levon, who accused the government of pressuring courts and law enforcement to open investigations. Pashinyan responded by asking where the family’s wealth had come from, saying any assets gained at public expense should be returned to the state. Kocharyan had previously gone on trial in 2019 over the deadly suppression of protests after the disputed 2008 election, though those charges were later dropped.
Analyst Alexander Iskandaryan, director of the Caucasus Institute in Yerevan, said the case would sharpen the conflict between the pro-Russian opposition and Pashinyan’s pro-Western government. “Of course, this is a signal to the Kremlin,” he said, describing a trend of the authorities moving “intensively and by all possible means” against forces aligned with Russia. Pashinyan, re-elected in June, has pushed Armenia closer to the European Union. Last year the leader of the largest opposition party, Armenian-Russian billionaire Samvel Karapetyan, was arrested on suspicion of calling for the government’s overthrow.
