The Anti-Corruption Committee (ACC) claimed that Sarkisian had given privileged treatment to a businessman close to him before intervening in the latter’s entrepreneurial activities to benefit himself and his family. In particular, the ACC said Sarkisian was instrumental in the 2015 sale of lucrative companies belonging to the late businessman, Mikhail Bagdasarov, to a firm linked to one of his sons-in-law.
The ex-president’s lawyer, Amram Makinian, dismissed the charges. He said that Sarkisian and Bagdasarov denied them when they were jointly interrogated by investigators in April 2020. The businessman died in August 2020.
“That accusation is yet another fabrication that the authorities are spreading at a time when they expect certain events, which will once again hang over the country's head, to happen soon,” Makinian told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service.
“Why did they keep the case on hold for five years?” he said. “Who ordered them to do that?”
Sarkisian, who ruled the country from 2008-2018 and now leads a major opposition group, first went on trial in 2020 for allegedly helping a longtime friend and businessman win a public procurement contract in 2013. He and several other defendants were cleared of any wrongdoing in 2024. The judge who handed down that ruling was removed from the bench last October. An appeals court overturned the acquittal in April this year.
Prosecutors revealed a second criminal case against Sarkisian in March this year just a couple of days after Pashinian lashed out at him and another ex-president, Robert Kocharian, in a speech and a series of social media posts. The charges stem from the privatization of state-owned land in Yerevan in 2005. Sarkisian, who served as defense minister at the time, denies helping to privatize the land at cutdown prices. His second trial began in May.
Also in May, the ACC said Sarkisian had received in February-April 2008 an almost $3 million bribe in exchange for not impeding the sale of an unnamed private company. Those accusations were formally filed shortly after Sarkisian was removed from power in 2018. The ex-president denies them too.
In all of those cases, the statute of limitations has already expired, meaning that he will not go to jail if found guilty. Sarkisian’s political allies say that Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian simply keeps trying to discredit one of his leading political foes.