According to a recently made Government decision 755 million AMD was allocated to procure apartments for a number of government officials of Police, Special Investigation Service, Prosecutor’s Office and Ministry of Finance. Moreover, those apartments were provided by the right of ownership. In some cases the apartments cost up till 117 thousand USD. In that regard Radio Liberty interviewed Artak Manukyan, Procurement Expert of Transparency International Anticorruption Center (TIAC). As a result of TIAC monitoring it was exposed that the Government purchased 28 apartments for emergency situations without tender from MikShin and MikMetal companies. In the opinion of Artak Manukyan the studies revealed that they were the same organization with different names.

“Those companies have the same authorized representative that acts as party to any agreement. There is interrelation here and it is not excluded that the ownership right to the building was divided into two parts, that is the property of two different companies or shares were sold. If it were the ownership of one company it would have been a more suspicious deal, implying that they were conducting large-size single source procurement,” stated Artak Manukyan.

It must be clearly defined as to why the government decided to improve some officials’ conditions and provide them with expensive apartments in a country having disaster zone. It gave rise to think over the criteria they had chosen. Applying no criteria at all implied embezzlement of state funds.

Half of the money allocated at the expense of state funds was provided for the employees of police but no name of beneficiary was mentioned for either of the 11 apartments, whereas in other agreements there were mentions of the beneficiaries’ names. It was the authorized representative of the police who acted as buyer. The apartments were intended for service use, i.e. they were not provided for property right.

The inquiries of Radio Liberty to the Prosecutor’s Office remained unanswered. As for the Government, they responded that they had nothing to add to what they replied to written request by Hetq, that is “by providing that project they attempted to make government job attractive.”