Aram Orbelyan, managing partner and lawyer at Concern Dialog law firm, described as deceptive the proposal to abolish the possibility of settlements in cases involving the confiscation of assets of illicit origin, Sputnik Armenia reports.
“A settlement agreement on the condition of paying 75% is in itself absurd within the logic of the system we currently have. Moreover, that 75% is not a fixed figure; it is the threshold below which the prosecutor’s office has no right to settle. But if the prosecutor’s office is confident, its evidence is sufficient, there is no evidence to the contrary and it will win the case, there is no point in discussing any settlement at all,” the lawyer said.
At the same time, given what Orbelyan described as unnecessary delays in proceedings in such cases, which he said occurred through the fault of the prosecutor’s office itself, citizens have often preferred to pay a certain amount, avoid prolonged litigation and peacefully continue with their affairs. However, according to the lawyer, the prosecutor’s office has not agreed to settlements for less than 75%.
Orbelyan also stressed that in many cases the amount demanded was unjustifiably inflated, rising from 100 million drams to as much as 10-20 billion drams.
“When a person tries to pay that 75%, a situation arises in which they have to pay more money than they possess at that moment. Therefore, there is no logic in discussing any settlement whatsoever. It makes sense to pursue the case to the end. In the worst-case scenario, the person will go bankrupt and give up whatever they have, but they will not end up in the red, as they would under a settlement,” Orbelyan said.
According to the lawyer, the mechanism established by law was intended not to recover what had already been looted, but to prevent looting and stop it from occurring.
Aram Orbelyan described Nikol Pashinyan’s statement that former officials had been given enough time to make payments as another deception, arguing that in reality no one had been given an opportunity to conclude the process by paying money.
“Unless, of course, they entered the realm of what might be called coordinated deception. In other words, ‘you lower these figures, I raise those figures, we value this one higher and that one lower.’ But that is an entirely different realm, one that deepens the corruption process rather than combating it,” Orbelyan said.
Under the Law on Confiscation of Assets of Illicit Origin, adopted in 2020 and currently in force, a person against whom proceedings for the confiscation of assets of illicit origin have been initiated may conclude a settlement agreement if they undertake to transfer to the state up to 75% of the value of the assets deemed illicit.
According to data published by the Prosecutor General’s Office, 11 settlement agreements have so far been concluded in illicit asset cases, while the amount confiscated has exceeded $15 million.
