A senior official has defended the Armenian government for spending nearly $6 million on American rapper Snoop Dogg’s concert in Yerevan that was originally scheduled for September 23, 2023.
The concert was cancelled two days after Azerbaijan launched on September 19 a military offensive in Nagorno-Karabakh that forced the region’s entire population to flee to Armenia. Despite that, Snoop Dogg and his production team received a performance fee of about $3 million.
The rest of the government money was paid to the Armenian organizer of the open-air concert, a little-known company called Doping Space. A new contract signed with the Ministry of Education, Science, Culture and Sports in February commits Doping Space to organizing the show “in the course of 2024.”
The company insisted this week that the concert will take place later this year. “We will inform you when the date is clear,” it told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service.
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The sum allocated for the concert exceeds the annual budgets of most rural communities of Armenia. Critics condemned the government spending as reckless extravagance aimed at distracting Armenians from grave national security problems facing their country.
Government officials insisted that the money is worth it because the concert will raise Armenia’s international profile and attract thousands of foreign tourists. The chief of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian’s staff, Arayik Harutiunian, echoed that explanation when he spoke to reporters on Tuesday.
“If we want to become an international tourist destination, we have to make investments in order to develop the sector,” said Harutiunian.
But as Varuzhan Hoktanian, who runs Armenia’s leading anti-corruption watchdog affiliated with Transparency International, pointed out, the contract with Doping Space says nothing about tourism.
The Ministry of Education, Science, Culture and Sports financed the concert from its special budget designed to promote music and arts with a “national basis.” It did not explain how this relates to Snoop Dogg.
The rap star has had a history of using drugs. Some of his songs have drug references, a fact also cited by Armenian critics of the governing funding for his concert.
