YEREVAN, April 19 (The Bulletin) — Prosecutors in Armenia charged Davit Sanasaryan, head of the anti-corruption service and a close ally of PM Nikol Pashinyan in last year’s Velvet Revolution, with corruption.
The accusations against Mr Sanasaryan come as Armenians celebrate the first year anniversary of the revolution and will embarrass Mr Pashinyan who has made an anti-corruption drive against Armenia’s former government a key policy.
In February, police arrested two senior officials in the State Oversight Service, which Mr Sanasaryan heads, and a senior executive from Zorashen, a health services company. Armenia’s National Security Service has said that the two officials at the State Oversight Service manipulated a government dialysis tender in 2018 to ensure that the contract was given to Zorashen.
The accused deny the charges. Instead, they say that they are being targeted by opponents of the revolution who want to discredit Mr Pashinyan and his core team.
“The fight for a new Armenia continues. The accusations against me were fabricated, thus there won’t be any evidence,” Mr Sanasaryan wrote on Facebook. “It would be more reasonable to suspect me of killing Kennedy than of being engaged in corruption.”
Mr Sanasaryan, 34, was a visible, and distinctive, presence in the revolution, standing side-by-side with Mr Pashinyan during the street protests.
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— This story was first published in issue 408 of the weekly Conway Bulletin newspaper