Yesterday Samvel Balasanyan, the newly-elected Prosperous Armenia Party (PAP) mayor of Gyumri, published a huge list of debts and abuses of office, which he had inherited from former RPA mayor Vardan Ghukasyan. Is it possible that President Serzh Sargsyan has given him carte blanche like he has done with the Prime Minister, particularly given the fact that he offered Balasanyan to participate in the mayoral election? In response to this observation of www.aravot.am, Manvel Badeyan, an RPA MP, said, “Why do you oversimplify the social life, the political life? He gave carte blanch… carte blanche is written in the law that if a man
abuses his office, steals, gets kickbacks etc., that person must be tried regardless of whether he is a member of the PAP or a member of the RPA or a neo-Nazi.”
We inquired of Mr. Badeyan whether he thought it was possible that criminal charges would be brought against Vardan Ghukasyan. “I think yes,” he said. Mr. Badeyan got annoyed because of the question whether the RPA hadn’t known about the activities of Vardan Ghukasyan so far, “A party is not an investigation body, after all; how can a party know? Law-enforcement bodies and journalists usually know. Did you know? Have you talked about that?”
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We clarified that the press had written about different masterpieces of Vardan Ghukasyan many times and asked whether law-enforcers had failed, Manvel Badeyan said, “Yes, if there really is a crime and they don’t deal with it, they are to blame.”
Nelly GRIGORYAN
