Recently the Prime Minister of Armenia Hovik Abrahamyan announced that the Government is looking for ways to subsidize the electricity tariff and reconfirmed once again that it is not going to be taken from the state budget.
If we accept that it is hardly possible that members of Government pay for it from their own means, the method of deduction will make it clear that a loan is going to be taken from somewhere.
And irrespective of the degree of possibility of its relation to the approximately $ 200 million loan received from Russia, that amount is going to be paid from the taxes that we or our children will pay. It means that if we do not pay those 7 drams immediately from our pocket now, we will pay it later through taxes paid to the budget together with all the interest rates.
It is worth mentioning here that according to the privatization agreement with the Electric Networks of Armenia (ENA), Armenia is obliged to guarantee that it will work with 14% profit. It means that the Public Services Regulatory Commission should fix such rates so that ENA passes the 14% profit to its owner Inter RAO OJSC.
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Consequently, in case of new electricity rates, we and our future generations will pay additional 3 billion dollars to ENA every month so that the company is able to ensure its 14% profit.
In its turn, 46% of “Inter RAO” OJSC indirectly belongs to the Russian Government. Hence, almost half of the profit gathered from our payments goes to the budget of the Russian Federation (if there are no corruption risks on the way). And 18% of that company belongs to its subsidiary (affiliate) organizations. Thus, the profit goes and circulates in the close chain of the company and its subsidiary organizations.
Naturally, a considerable amount of money goes to the pockets of heads of that pyramid-corporation.
Heads of “Inter RAO” OJSC are Igor Sechin and Boris Kovalchuk. The former is the head of the board of directors, the latter is chairman of the board.
These two people are RF President Vladimir Putin’s close friends. It is a long time they have been in the focus of corruption scandals in Russia and both of them have been under western sanctions for more than a year.
It means that the considerable part of the 7 drams gathered from Armenian citizens (even if it is done by loan-budget-tax or other scheme) will enter the pockets of Vladimir Putin’s close friends Boris Kovalchuk and Igor Sechin.
P.S. We cannot exclude the possibility of the hypothesis that the Russian TV channels saw an “American trace” in the protests against the electricity price hike in order to prevent the emergence of these corruption schemes. In this case, each discovery of corruption schemes would be called an “American lie”.
Daniel Ioannisyan
“Union of Informed Citizens”