Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian’s government set up the Armenian National Interests Fund (ANIF) in 2019 in an effort to not only lure foreign investors but also promote Armenian exports and support local businesses. ANIF clearly failed in that mission, leading the government to liquidate it in August 2025.
A year before that decision, a corruption investigation was launched into the fund’s four-year activities that reportedly cost taxpayers at least 10.7 billion drams ($27.3 million). Armenian opposition leaders have repeatedly portrayed that as proof of government corruption.
It emerged at the weekend that Davit Papazian, ANIF’s former executive director, has been charged with money laundering, abuse of power and forgery of documents. Similar charges have also been brought against Bella Manukian, the former head of an ANIF subsidiary that invested in 2023 over 1.5 billion drams ($3.8 million) in an obscure company newly registered in the U.S. state of Delaware.
The investment was supposed to help the company, CFW, train cybersecurity specialists for Armenia’s private sector. CFW is understood to have effectively stopped operating a year later. Its chief executive, Karine Andreasian, is a third indicted suspect in the case.
Andreasian is a close friend of Yerevan Mayor Tigran Avinian’s wife, Mariam Pahlavuni. She secured the government funding, significant by Armenian standards, at a time when Avinian headed ANIF’s board of directors.
Not surprisingly, Avinian has faced corruption allegations ever since the suspicious investment was exposed by the investigative publication Hetq.am early this year. He has denied them. Investigators declined to say on Monday whether they have interrogated the mayor, who is a senior member of Pashinian’s Civil Contract party.
None of the suspects answered written questions sent by RFE/RL’s Armenian Service. Sources said that two of them, Papazian and Andreasian, are not in Armenia at the moment.
Early this year, Papazian was appointed to the governing board of the U.S. and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) widely blamed for the reported deaths of at least 1,800 Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip.
The London-based news website Middle East Eye reported last Thursday that the Arab Organization for Human Rights (AOHR) in Britain has appealed to Armenian prosecutors to investigate Papazian’s role in GHF’s highly controversial food distribution in Gaza. The AOHR claimed that he “may have been involved in, or facilitated, actions that amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity.” The Office of the Prosecutor-General in Yerevan said on Monday that it is looking into the appeal.