Pashinian accused former Presidents Serzh Sarkisian and Robert Kocharian and their political allies of trying to discredit him with false corruption claims. He specifically blamed them for an allegation by an obscure French website that his family bought a villa in France for $3 million.
“Now that these four directions of confiscation of illegal property have been stepped up [by Armenian prosecutors,] they have one objective: to show that we are like them,” Pashinian told a weekly cabinet meeting in Yerevan. “They are not even trying to prove that they are robbers, scoundrels, swindlers, excuse me for these phrases.”
“I have a reasonable suspicion that Nikol Pashinian is the richest person in Armenia,” Kocharian told reporters on May 19.
The 70-year-old ex-president, who now leads the main opposition Hayastan alliance, claimed that at least $2 billion of $7 billion in public debt incurred by Armenia during Pashinian’s seven-year rule has been misused or wasted. He also pointed to an apparently stalled criminal investigation into a government fund that was liquidated last year after failing to attract foreign investment in Armenia during four-year activities that reportedly cost taxpayers at least 10.7 billion drams ($27.3 million).
Kocharian himself faced corruption allegations during and after his 1998-2008 presidency. Shortly after Pashinian came to power in 2018, he was charged with accepting a $3 million bribe from a businesswoman in 2008.
A resulting trial of Kocharian ended without a verdict in 2023 after he agreed to plead the statute of limitations despite strongly denying the bribery charges. A trial prosecutor noted at the time that he was neither convicted nor acquitted of the charges. Pashinian on Thursday claimed, however, that the court ruled that Kocharian is a “corrupt person.”
Also, prosecutors have been trying to confiscate a long list of assets belonging to Kocharian and his extended family which they say were acquired illegally. The ex-president, who plans to mount another challenge to Pashinian in Armenia’s next parliamentary elections, has dismissed the asset forfeiture proceedings as politically motivated.
Pashinian has repeatedly claimed to have eliminated “systemic corruption” in Armenia. However, members of his entourage are increasingly accused by media of using their positions to enrich themselves, their families or cronies. Last month, Pashinian threatened to jail lawmakers from Kocharian’s Hayastan bloc after they accused him of turning a blind eye to those media reports.